


Sea Dragon

by WerdeSpinner



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, I don't care for whatever Kishimoto said and you may quote me on that, Many Many OC's - Freeform, OC's dying like flies, Uzushio Village, canon makes no sense so I do what I want, cultural and linguistic and religious diversity ahoy, fudging some ages to make a coherent timeline whoops, it's not an AU until you have 500+ pages of notes, lbr who likes them anyway, ninja politics: hire a samurai, ninja world demographic winter? not on MY watch, no aliens AU, no beta we die like men, the Ootsutsuki exist but they ain't aliens, throwing out Boruto and most of the novels, worldbuilding galore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2018-09-25 18:06:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 47,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9836918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WerdeSpinner/pseuds/WerdeSpinner
Summary: Uzushio will live as long as the survivors of its fall carry its legacy in their hearts. Her clan may be as tattered now as the Uzumaki, but Shimizu Kiyoko will carry on its history and techniques. OC-centric. Gloriously AU. Canon characters will show up eventually.





	1. Great Is the Fall of Uzushio

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned _Naruto,_ Uzushio wouldn’t be just a footnote in the history books. I mean, I’m not saying that there should have been an epic flashback to its fall with Balrogs and metal dragons a la the fall of Gondolin, but something, _anything,_ would have been nice.

Uzushio was dying.

 

Of course, it would be more accurate to say, ‘Uzushio was falling,’ or, ‘Uzushio had been invaded and was now being ransacked,’ or even, ‘Uzushio was being torn to pieces and its inhabitants slaughtered in droves by Kumo and Kiri in their jealous anger and fear,’ none of which statements ascribed any sort of life, even metaphorical life, to the village of Uzushio. Ordinarily, Sumiko valued such accuracy. She wasn’t the poetic sort. Never had been. That wasn’t to say that she lacked creativity; she had plenty of creativity. She wouldn’t have devised so many insanely brilliant (or brilliantly insane – even she had to admit this possibility) sealing arrays through the years if she lacked creativity. However, she was practical and analytical, her mental gears poised to judge the truth of things and act upon such information with quick precision and accuracy.

 

Precision and accuracy were two vital qualities to have for a fuuinjutsu mistress such as she.

 

However, Uzushio _was_ dying, and Sumiko supposed she could spare a moment of sentiment for the great village in which she had been born and lived her whole life. And in which she would be dying shortly. No two ways about that.

 

To think that today death was so close, when less than a week ago almost no one would have thought an invasion imminent.

 

Of course, there had been tensions among the Elemental Nations. When was there not? However, it could not be denied that international relations had been steadily deteriorating, approaching a level of frostiness not seen in twenty years, not since just before what was now known as the Great Shinobi War broke out.  

 

Uzushio had not suffered as greatly in that conflict as the five great Hidden Villages had suffered. After all, Uzushio’s long-standing policy had been to stay out of conflicts on the mainland that did not involve them or their territory. They had left the days of endless warfare behind them when several clans came together under the leadership of the Uzumaki to found their city on an island over a hundred years ago. In the days leading up to the Great Shinobi War, before any hint of the disasters that were to befall the nations had emerged, Uzushio had seen no need to completely abandon their tradition of non-involvement.

 

Even so, they had stepped away from their neutrality enough to form a military alliance with their younger sister village, Konoha. That had been primarily on account of the Senju, with whom the Uzumaki and the other clans of Uzushio had already had two generations of good relations – although the Uchiha might have had something to do with it as well. The Uzumaki acknowledged the common descent of those three clans from the Sage of Six Paths, and an unspoken hope that the co-founding of Konoha would be enough cause for their distant relations to stop squabbling had definitely been in the air.

 

Not even two decades after the founding of Konoha had come that year of hell, better known as the Great Shinobi War. Uzushio had given aid to Konoha, had assisted with honorable Senju Hashirama’s mad plan to buy peace across the Elemental Nations with the Tailed Beasts, for all the good it had done. Scarcely had the accords been reached at that first Five Kage Summit than Hashirama-sama was dead, under mysterious and still-debated circumstances, and his brother had followed him several months later. Most of the villages found themselves already on their third kage when that year was up and wisely chose not to renew hostilities.

 

Sumiko did not like to think of that year.

 

Privately, she had resolved to do more, should world war ever stain the Elemental Nations again in her lifetime. She could not stand the thought of suffering such losses once more. Her notebooks from that year and the next few years after were full of terrifying ideas, her lines thick and dark on the page as she pushed too much ink into her designs and hacked away at the limits of the sealing arts. Now, she could look back with a clearer mind and observe that some of her ideas had crossed the line, so desperate had she been as she poured her grief and rage into her fuuinjutsu. Nevertheless, she had been prepared to do what she thought necessary to defend her own.

 

The embers of that grief and rage had never quite died in her soul, although she had wrapped them up carefully in her controlled mannerisms and her sealing paper and her bland little smile and her interest in her young daughter – her miracle child, her precious Hiromi, the sole light left in her life, the only reason she had not marched out of Uzushio in a rage when that terrible news came to hunt down the bastards responsible and wreak unspeakable vengeance on them, the only reason those horrifying ink-heavy seals in her notebooks stayed in her notebooks and had never been used.

 

She loved and had loved Hiromi _so much_ , and yet she could never show it, could never properly relate to her, could not answer her questions when they touched too near the buried grief and rage in her heart. She could not even teach fuuinjutsu to her; it had reminded her too much of sitting next to another whom she would never see again and talking shop, going over each other’s work and bouncing ideas off each other, scribbling things in the margins of each other’s notes…

 

It hurt _so much_ , and yet Sumiko, with all her clarity of thought, with all her love of precision and accuracy, with all her disdain of ambiguity, could not articulate it, could not explain to her daughter that it was not her fault, that she loved her, that she was proud of her, that _he_ would have been proud of her, too… The words just would not come.

 

 _Emotionally constipated_ , Satomi would say. Sumiko could not really disagree.

 

No, Sumiko did not like to think of that year. However, she was not so blind as to omit it from her plans and her actions. She would stand with Konoha, should war seek to ravage it once more, and she would let loose her long-buried grief and rage upon its enemies.

 

Many others in Uzushio, it seemed, had similar resolve. And so, during this past year, as tensions heightened between the Hidden Villages and nations subtly or not-so-subtly probed the strength of their neighbors, Uzushio had made an announcement. It would not merely stand behind Konoha again, helping in minor ways. It would stand _beside_ Konoha, and the world would tremble at the sight of the Uzushio spiral.

 

Uzushio, it was declared, would go to war in all its strength, if it deemed it necessary.

 

In retrospect, perhaps that had been what had terrified the other nations into concerted action.

 

A week ago, a diplomatic missive for the Raikage had been sent to the border of the Land of Lightning. Despite the open declaration of support for Konoha, Uzushio did not _wish_ for war; if matters could be settled without bloodshed, so much the better. Uzumaki-sama was not unable to read the mood of the Elemental Nations, however, and had taken precautions. The three envoys carrying the missive had been accompanied by two other squads, who were instructed to keep pace with them and remain out of sight unless the missive handover at the border with Lightning went foul or otherwise disaster occurred.

 

Hiromi, her precious Hiromi, had been chosen for one of those two escort squads because of her skills as a medic. It was nothing unusual. Hiromi had taken part in many missions that necessitated travel outside of Uzushio or Konoha territory before; she had passed through the Land of Hot Water on multiple occasions, so it was not as if she were wholly unfamiliar with the route. Additionally, she had acquired a reputation for level-headedness and determination in the field, traits that had served her well in dragging injured and exhausted teammates home with her. Her decent chakra sensing ability had likely been another factor in her selection for this mission.

 

Even so. Sumiko had harbored an irrational distrust of diplomatic missions ever since that terrible year. Too many had been thinly-disguised treachery, mere pretenses for further catastrophe. And then, when it had seemed that the fighting was drawing to a close, _he_ had died on what was supposed to be a diplomatic mission.

 

Hiromi had been a year old. He had barely even seen her. And Kumo had betrayed him, had turned peace negotiations to a farce. Sumiko had only been further angered by attempts to console her and especially by statements such as, “It was his choice,” and, “He would have preferred to go out fighting.”

 

 _No_ , she had said to herself with gritted teeth, _he should not have had to choose._

 

And here she had been, almost two full decades later, watching her daughter pack for her mission to the Lightning border, and unable to tell her why it filled her with such dread.

 

An inexplicable urge filled her. She wanted to catch her daughter by the hand, to ask her to leave the packing for later – the squads were setting out in the morning, after all; it could wait an hour –, to hug her and tell her all the things she had been incapable of saying, to spill out everything about _him_ and that terrible year, to plead with her to be extra careful on this mission, to beg her to come back alive.

 

 _Don’t leave me_ , she wanted to beg. _Don’t you leave me, too. How can I live, if the last light of my life is taken?_

 

But her throat had closed up and her tongue had cloven to the roof of her mouth, and as she turned away with eyes burning with tears that would never be shed she had rationalized it away to herself. It was useless to burden Hiromi with this information now. Such revelations and a mother’s irrational fear would only serve as a distraction on this mission, and distractions were the last thing Hiromi needed.

 

No, she could not tell her.

 

Instead, Sumiko had hovered, as she hadn’t done in years. Her unique brand of hovering mostly consisted of leaning against the wall with arms folded and a bland expression, asking rapid-fire questions about Hiromi’s preparations. What was the planned itinerary? Did she know all the squad members? Could she trust them all to act as needed in an emergency? Was she _sure_ she had packed everything? Maybe she should check her medic’s pack again. Did she have enough seals stored on her? Sumiko could give her plenty; she even had a seal designed to hijack the body’s nerve impulses that she really wanted to test on a Kumo nin – she suspected it’d be doubly effective on a raiton user. Hiromi could take it, just in case…

 

Hiromi had borne this with surprising grace. Honestly, Sumiko was surprised that their relationship was as good as it was. Sometimes she could not believe that she had raised someone as patient and kind-hearted as Hiromi, because she had certainly not gotten any of that from _her_.

 

Even Hiromi’s patience had its limits, though. She finally sat back on her heels with a small frown. “Okaa-san, I can handle this.”

 

Sumiko barely blinked. “I know you can.”

 

Hiromi sighed. After a moment, when it had become clear that the endless stream of questions had dried up, she relented a little. “If you really want me to, I’ll take a copy of that nerve impulse seal.”

 

Sumiko twirled her fingers, a tag suddenly appearing between them. “Just in case.”

 

Hiromi nodded, carefully stowing the tag away where she would not confuse it with seals designed for other purposes. “Just in case.”

 

She didn’t even go on her usual rant of how _she_ would look at such a tag and think of the possible beneficial medical purposes it could serve while her mother would only think of the harm and havoc she could wreak with it. It was the closest they would get to Sumiko acknowledging her worry and Hiromi assuring her that she’d be careful.

 

Sumiko was not surprised when Hiromi did not even question her sudden outbreak of concern – for her standards – over a diplomatic mission. Hiromi had long learned, through years of non-answers, that it was useless to ask. Sumiko vaguely regretted that fact now.

 

Hiromi had departed before dawn the next morning. Over the next couple of days, Sumiko had very firmly resisted uncharacteristic sentimental urges to pester the hapless desk-nin in Uzumaki-sama’s tower for news, to look at old keepsakes she had stored away, to stand on the walls of Uzushio and stare out at the horizon, to mope around or sit consumed by worry.

 

Sentiment would not help in the least. It had not before.

 

Instead, Sumiko had organized her notes and tidied up some of the mess that had accumulated around her sealing station. In a fit of fatalism, she checked that everything was good to go, should she die. It was only a prudent move with the threat of war hanging over the nations, after all. She even keyed Hiromi into the seals containing her records and old research, all the while trying very hard not to think about the other person still keyed in to those seals, even years later.

 

The envoys and their escort squads had not yet returned when the ninja assigned to Uzushio’s outposts reported unusual blips on their monitoring arrays. No sooner had this been reported then they went silent, and alarms sounded in the monitoring stations embedded in Uzushio’s walls.

 

Uzushio had not been protected alone by the eponymous whirlpools and raging seas girting the island. Generations of Uzumaki and other sealmasters before had erected a complicated and effective system of monitoring seals to keep an eye on their territory. No enemy would approach Uzushio without being seen, one way or another.

 

Yet now someone was systematically hunting these watchers down and taking them out, as if they exactly where to find them and how to nullify them or destroy them. Within a day, all the outposts had blinked out, and Uzushio’s vision beyond the walls of its city had been stolen.

 

A general alarm had been issued for the city, and yet even then many of its inhabitants had not assumed the worst. The walls of Uzushio were tall and strong, formed of thick stone and engraved with so many seals that their extensive patterns seemed more decorative than functional. Their like unparalleled in the Elemental Nations, never once had they allowed foe to enter since the day they had been completed. In fact, a slightly fanciful telling of their construction was a popular bedtime story for children in Uzushio:

 

 

> _…Then Uzumaki Akira-sama said, Let us build a wall around our village, so that no enemies may threaten our people. And they all agreed. So Shimizu Sazanami-sama bade his dragon rip up the seabed, and it tore up great chunks of stone and laid them in a circle around the village. Then Fuyuchi Chiyo-sama held out her hands, and ice formed over the stones until the gaps were filled and they formed one wall. Then Uzumaki Akira-sama carved her seals upon the wall and its gate and poured her blood into them, and she said, As long as my blood holds true these walls shall never fall. And the people said, So let it be…_

Legends meant nothing, however, in the face of oncoming war. Foreign shinobi marched to the mainland’s edge and set out across the sea, despite the whirlpools said to be formed by the breath of Sazanami’s dragon sleeping in the depths below. Foreign shinobi landed on the shores of Uzushio’s island and swarmed up its cliffs, despite the rain of frozen droplets as strong as steel and kunai-sharp that were said to be Chiyo’s tears falling from the clouds. Foreign shinobi came to the walls that were Akira’s last defense for the city she had founded, and there they were stymied.

 

For a day battle raged on the walls of Uzushio. Identifiable at last by their hitai-ate as well as the lightning and water crashing upon the walls, Kumo and Kiri nin flung themselves at their enemies with fierce cries, desperate to kill them before Uzushio could turn its strength upon the world. Seals crackled and sparked along the length of the walls, claiming many lives in various fashions, some messier than others. Violent swirls of water marked Uzumaki ninjutsu masters challenging their Kiri foes in the art of suiton. Daggers and spears of ice flew from both sides; Kiri’s Yuki Clan faced Uzushio’s Fuyuchi in a staggering display of hyouton techniques that would never again be replicated in this world.

 

Then, on the second day, the invaders breached the walls.

 

Some said that Kumo brought a jinchuuriki; some said that it had been Kiri. Others dismissed this, saying that no one was stupid enough to bring a jinchuuriki into Uzumaki territory, where the Tailed Beast might be caught by the red-headed fuuinjutsu masters and sealed into one of their own. Many were the rumors, and the worst were those of treachery. The Uzumaki valued family and loyalty above all, and they had treated all clans to join them with love and respect. It was unthinkable that anyone would willingly deliver Uzushio into the hands of its despoilers.

 

Sumiko could not say. She had not been present at the first breach. She had spent a long day and a sleepless night rushing from one part of the city to another as part of the fuuinjutsu corps, strengthening defensive seals in one area, laying down landmine seals in another, and so forth. She had just managed to catch a couple hours’ rest in a corner of the Sealing Tower when the news of the breach came in.

 

The fuuinjutsu masters there – those who remembered a time before kages, a time before the five younger Hidden Villages, who recalled all too well those days when news of a clan on the mainland being utterly wiped out by another was all too common – had all traded a long, silent look. Even before the order came from Uzumaki-sama, they knew what had to be done.

 

This went beyond emergency protocols. This called for apocalypse protocols. The invaders would _not_ get their hands on Uzumaki techniques. The head of the sealing corps, Uzumaki Shinju, gazed out at her remaining sealmasters with eyes steely behind her glasses before sending them off to key places in the village. What could go into lockdown was to go into lockdown; blood seals that would only permit Uzumaki or members of their vassal clans to enter were preferred. She even gave them blanket permission to use the nastier seals that had been taken out of usage for one reason or another, as long as they went into keeping their village’s secrets safe or into taking out its invaders.

 

At that pronouncement, Sumiko’s thoughts drifted to a packet she had sealed away with the rest of the techniques she had developed in the depths of her grief and rage after the Great Shinobi War. Objectively speaking, it did not contain the _worst_ of the techniques she had sealed away once sanity prevailed; like its original creator, whose work she had merely brought to perfection, she believed that this technique had a place in apocalyptic circumstances.

 

 _Surely, if any place and time were ever to qualify as apocalyptic circumstances, it would be now,_ she said to herself. _Our need is dire, and it could possibly give us the edge we need now, unlooked-for and beyond hope._ Ruthlessly, she shoved away any personal motives, instead focusing clinically on the technique, on its costs and its ramifications. _Should I use it?_

 

She considered it for a long, terrible moment, but in the end dismissed the notion. _No, not even now will I use it_ , she decided. _The cost is simply too high. The world is still not so beyond hope as to justify_ that _technique. I suppose my preparations for it will be ultimately wasted._

She could not say what her heart felt at this decision. Relief, that she would not cross that line after all? Injured pride, that her work would all be for nothing? Rage, that she should be pushed so far as to even consider this technique? She shied away from thinking any further of this, lest she find other possibilities.

Pulling herself out of her thoughts, Sumiko glanced around at the other sealing masters present in the tower. Briefly, she allowed herself to wonder if any of them were entertaining similar thoughts. She would be honestly surprised if none of them had ever devised a technique and then hidden it away from the light of day, vowing to never speak or think of it again. After all, most of them were Uzumaki, and the Uzumaki had done great and terrible things with their fuuinjutsu in the past.

 

They had given the world plenty of reason to seek to wipe them out rather than become their target.

 

Shinju-sama’s voice drew her full attention once more. “This may be the fall of Uzushio,” she said, her voice cutting like a kunai through the silence. No sound of the devastation being wreaked outside the Sealing Tower could penetrate its walls, and the dissonant quiet made the moment all the more solemn. “This may be the end of us all. However, we shall make _such an end_ that our enemies, and our enemies’ children, and our enemies’ children’s children, shall shake with fear at our memory. We will make them pay in blood for every step they take into our city. For every harm they inflict, we shall return it tenfold. In our defeat, we will cripple them. Long after our deaths, they shall whisper, ‘Great was the fall of Uzushiogakure.’”

 

As the day wore on, this grim resolve spread through the tired ranks of the defenders. In the attacking force, the Kumo nin alone might have outnumbered the active shinobi of Uzushio, and for every Kumo nin present stood two Kiri nin willing to take his place. However, the inhabitants of the Village Hidden in the Whirlpools fought with a viciousness they had not expected.

 

The boom of exploding tags and the crumble of fallen masonry formed a constant thunder echoing around the city. Lightning flashed, and fires ripped through the city despite all the water being thrown around. The canals were choked with wreckage and decaying bodies; the drainage and water treatment system malfunctioned and spilled sewage and sea water into the streets. Smoke hung over the city like mist over Kiri. The very air stank of death. Buildings shifted and tilted, leaning precariously over streets and canals and sometimes collapsing without regard upon invaders and defenders alike.

 

No one was counting the death toll anymore. They had lost count a long time ago.

 

The night of the second day, word spread among those still in communication, however haphazard, with the core of the city. Uzumaki-sama had ordered an evacuation after the last emergency protocols and lockdowns had been put in place. Those with the evacuation would exit the city and make a break for Konoha while the majority of the Kumo and Kiri forces were tied up in the seal-trapped city. There was a strong possibility that this evacuation attempt would only end in failure, that those in it would be pinned and slaughtered before leaving the city or that once they made it out the remainder of Kumo’s forces – lurking somewhere out of sight, just waiting; everyone knew they could field more shinobi than _this_ – would come down upon them like a hammer of wrath before they could reach Konoha.

 

But it was still an evacuation attempt worth making.

 

It was now approaching the morning of the third day. Sumiko was dead tired. Never before had she felt her age so deeply in every bone as she had now. Her eyes burned with weariness; her head throbbed with the effort of constant concentration and chakra usage. But her hands were still steady enough, and she drew on the buried rage and grief in her heart as an endless source of motivation, as strength enough to let her put one foot in front of the other and fold her fingers together into another handseal.

 

When news of the imminent evacuation attempt reached her, she accepted without fuss her role among those staying behind to give the invaders a fresh taste of hell as a distraction.

 

 _It’s only fitting_ , she thought darkly, before she pushed that thought away. Even now, she did not want to think of that year. She did not want to think of diplomatic incidents gone wrong, of the very real possibility that Hiromi had been trapped and killed by Kumo to prevent news of the invasion from reaching Uzushio in time.

 

None of it mattered now. It could not be helped, anyway. Uzushio was dying, and soon she would be, too.

 

She stood up from her crouch, ignoring the shakiness of her limbs and the dull burn throughout her body warning her that she was already dangerously low on chakra. The newly-traced black lines of sealing script did not waver as she pulled her gloved hands away from the wall.

 

“Done?” asked Akio.

 

Sumiko turned. Uzumaki Akio still stood on the walk next to the nearby canal, his toes almost hanging over the edge and his hands locked in the Dog handseal. Below his feet, the water of the canal roiled, ready to rise up in righteous wrath should another invader try to cross. A couple of Kiri nin had tried already, rushing ahead to reclaim the territory they had been driven out of only a few hours before, confident in their own combat abilities and their mastery of suiton techniques, and had swiftly received a lesson in why it is not wise to oppose an Uzumaki master of suiton ninjutsu in his own land.

 

It could not last forever, however. Even from this angle, Sumiko could see the bruises mottling Akio’s left side from where he had been thrown against a building earlier, the blood dripping from his temple. His voice was tight with pain and concentration, but his stance did not waver, and his chakra still seemed as deep and full as the canal itself.

 

 _Damn Uzumaki and their ridiculous reserves_ , Sumiko thought idly. It was not a new thought for her.

 

She coughed as a dark tendril of smoke wafted between them, dark brown against the gray sky. She had lost count of how many buildings in this district were on fire an hour ago. Or was it two hours? No matter. At least the hospital did not number among them. At least, not yet. They had achieved that much. Retaking this district had been costly, and the corpses outnumbered the living here at least seven to one.

 

Sumiko had seen battlefields before. She could keep her eyes from lingering on the torn and blood-stained bodies littering the shattered pavement, could divert her attention away from the automatic process of trying to link names to slack and deathly-white features. Akio did not have the same amount of unfortunate practice. There was just a little too much stiffness in his posture, just a little too much intenseness on the way he kept scanning the avenues leading up to the canal and wrecked plaza, too much focus in not looking down at the carnage around him.

 

“Yes,” Sumiko replied, waving smoke away from her face before she could start coughing again. “The barrier we put up should hold them back from the hospital long enough for Ayako-sama and Akiko-sama to attempt the evacuation.”

 

Akio nodded. “Is Akemi-sama still alive?”

 

“Last I saw, yes.”

 

Akio’s attempt at a smile looked more like a grimace. “Maybe she’ll be able to pull off another miracle, save everyone’s lives all over again.”

 

Sumiko hmphed but said nothing. The boy’s perpetual optimism had certainly suffered, but it had not been completely ground into the dust. Perhaps he felt the need to put on a brave face? She didn’t bother correcting him. Observing how futile of a gesture this planned evacuation would be would change nothing. No words now could alter how unlikely it was that any of them would manage to escape this hell.

 

And what a hell it was. In the distance, the breaking dawn washed the sky and the sparse cloud cover pink and blood-orange. Between the flaming cityscape and the pall of dark, acrid smoke choking it, it seemed as if the whole world had been set on fire. The network of canals in the lower city, once busy with punts and floating markets and garden beds anchored so they would not drift away, was now choked with wreckage and torn bodies. Bloody foam lapped against the walls of the canal, the slap of the small waves inaudible amongst the distant rumble of combat. A brief white flash lit up a distant street.

 

Sumiko sniffed the air. Charred flesh, burning wood, rotting materials, a metallic tang saturating everything. No ozone. The Kumo nin hadn’t reached this section of the village yet. Once the breach in the walls had been established, their prong of the invading force had swept westwards through the path of least resistance down to the lower districts of the village, a primarily residential area containing the markets and the main Fuyuchi Clan compound. There, they had made their intent to wipe the name of Uzushio from the history books all too clear, cutting down every soul in their path, whether shinobi or civilian, whether old or young, whether male or female.

 

The Kiri nin, more bloodthirsty and more reckless thanks to their clans’ long history of on-again/off-again unrest with the Uzumaki, had instead swept east towards the more heavily fortified upper districts, where the principal Uzumaki clan buildings and other important structures stood. They had been met with savage resistance. Sumiko’s last glimpse of the seal-encrusted Uzumaki district gate had been half-obscured by smoke, but that had done nothing to hide the piles of bodies and body parts clumped around it.

 

It was a possibility, she supposed, that the gate no longer even stood. She had been called away to the defense of the hospital when some slightly more intelligent Kiri nin had attempted flanking the Uzumaki district and following the upper canal that led them past the Shimizu Clan compound and the hospital right up to the last inner gate before the heart of Uzushio and Uzumaki-sama’s tower. After that wave of Kiri bastards had been dealt with, Sumiko had not bothered to return to the Uzumaki district. What was the use? She’d stay here and lend her last expertise to the defense of the evacuation along with the other survivors of that assault.

 

It was only a matter of time before a new wave of attackers thought to follow the canal, after all.

 

“They’ll be here soon enough,” said Akio grimly, having thought the exact same thing. “Got any more tags?”

“I’m afraid I’ve exhausted my bag of tricks, Akio-kun,” Sumiko responded without even bothering to check her equipment pouches. She had run out of pre-prepared tags a day ago, even with brief moments snatched here and there to write more. However, even as she spoke, her eyes were darting over the area, analyzing angles and calculating potential damage. Depending on who, exactly, was part of the next wave of attackers, she had a few options for causing the most damage.

 

She didn’t even flinch when, across the canal, a couple of stray Kiri nin swung around a corner in pursuit of a wounded Uzushio nin, or when the water leapt out of the canal in a great twisting rope that wound around their torsos, bashed them a few times on the cracked pavement, and then dragged them into the depths of the canal.

 

Akio’s bitter laugh was cut short with a grimace. Definitely bruised or broken ribs, then. “Come on. Really, Sumiko-san? No last-minute stroke of genius to save all our asses once more?” Raising his voice, he called to the wounded nin, “You can come on over, Fuyuchi-san. Just watch where you step.”

 

The girl the Kiri nin had been chasing crossed the canal gingerly, avoiding the floating splinters and branches where the once-proud avenue of trees that had stood before the hospital had been swept into the water. Her left arm clutched her shredded right, and her teeth were clenched with the effort it took to put one foot in front of the other. Her dark hair was soaked with blood, and her distinctive pale eyes held a weariness far beyond the physical.

 

Against her will, Sumiko wondered if, after today, Kiri’s Yuki Clan would be the only users of the hyouton kekkei genkai left in the Elemental Nations.

 

As Akio pulled the Fuyuchi up onto the walk, she gasped out, “No good… back that way. All the market district… lost. Some bastard… suicide jutsu… hit the fountain… with a raiton. Killed almost everyone. That smell… the bodies… ugh…”

 

She couldn’t have been more than a chuunin. She certainly wasn’t out of her teens. Grimly assessing the girl’s injuries even as she pointed her in the direction of the possible evacuation, Sumiko was reminded of Hiromi, and she was tired enough to allow the distraction.

 

 _Where is Hiromi now?_ Sumiko wondered with a heavy sigh. _Did Kumo pretend to accept the missive and then proceed to slaughter every last messenger? Is she dead or dying somewhere in the countryside? Or did she manage to escape and tried to run back to warn us, only to be caught along the way? Hiromi… please live._

She squeezed her eyes shut, unable to stave off the comparison any longer. _Love… please don’t let her die the way you did._

 

Her unhappy train of thought was interrupted as from behind them Uzumaki Satomi walked up, dusting off her hands, a light of vicious satisfaction in her purple eyes. The scratches still bleeding on her cheek and arms only increased the ferocity of her expression. Her armor bore plenty of plenty of scratches and dents – and was that the splash of a raiton impact on her side? – but she carried herself without a visible sign of weakness.

 

 _Damn Uzumaki and their vitality_ , Sumiko thought again, without any heat.

 

Satomi jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “I set up some nasty traps down the walk after I finished with my corner of the hospital barrier. Should tie up the bastards for a while, at least.”

 

Sumiko didn’t doubt it. Satomi was one of her fellow fuuinjutsu experts and an excellent partner-in-crime (other people would have said ‘friend’). Sumiko had held a healthy appreciation of Satomi’s skills ever since they were six years old and Satomi had crafted a storage seal that blew up its contents whenever it was unsealed (no one knew even now whether Satomi had _meant_ to do that or not). If Satomi said her traps were nasty, they were _nasty_. Shinju-sama would approve.

 

Akio nodded. “So we’ve got this stretch of the canal and that side road over there to worry about, mainly. I guess we’re it?”

 

“Not many of us left to hold things here anyway. Everyone else is either helping with the evacuation, scuttling or sealing what they can to keep it out of enemy hands, or still fighting out in the rest of the village,” said Satomi with a shrug. “I’d like to think that some will make it out, but it won’t be us. Eh. We’ll make them work for it. Shinju-sama went to go lock down the clan meeting hall and the libraries. I’m pretty sure I heard her mutter, ‘Let’s see them try to access _this_ ,’ as she stalked off, so you can bet she’ll apocalypse-proof them and then go out in a blaze of glory.”

 

As if on cue, somewhere in the distance amid the tangle of listing towers, a beacon of otherworldly chakra suddenly flared. Tendrils of cold, dry air brushed across their faces, scattering the drifting smoke. Sumiko did not have to be a sensor to feel that oppressive presence; it was one that every living thing would feel and tremble before.

 

“…Shiki Fuujin,” Satomi whispered, awe and terror having chased the fierceness from her expression. “Well, _damn_ , Shinju-sama doesn’t do things by halves, does she?”

 

“That’s the fourth I’ve felt so far,” Akio said in a low voice.

 

Sumiko said nothing. Deep down inside, she marveled at the power of that dreaded Uzumaki technique, which bound death itself to do the sealmaster’s bidding, and she respected Shinju-sama all the more for her willingness to trade her life and her very soul away in exchange for such power. It was not a choice Sumiko could have made. Oh, she knew the requirements of the Shiki Fuujin and could, in theory, have performed it. She simply wasn’t willing to trade her afterlife for anything short of a direct and pressing need to save Hiromi’s life. And, as it stood, not even the Shiki Fuujin or related techniques could save Hiromi from uncertainty right now.

 

All three of the Uzushio shinobi in front of the scarred hospital were silent for a long moment, as the distant rumblings and screams faded to the background in the face of the silence of that presence. Only as that otherworldly chakra faded and the coldness leached out of the air did they dare to draw breath again. Around them, the world swam back into full harshness.

 

“ _Damn_ ,” Satomi repeated, still a bit subdued. “This really is it, isn’t it.”

 

“Yep.” Akio rubbed his face, brushing off flakes of dried blood. “I hope imouto makes it out. She’s only a genin…”

 

Satomi and Sumiko traded a glance, reminded of how much younger Akio and Chikako were than themselves. Suddenly, the differences between their generations – both physical and mental – seemed stark.

 

Akio wore one of those new flak jackets instead of the armor sets that the two women had never abandoned – Satomi’s of red metal plates over a black gambeson, Sumiko’s of lilac metal plates over a gray gambeson. They both carried extra weapons for last-ditch defense and had scrawled seals over their skin to hold days’ worth of supplies, among other purposes. Where younger shinobi prepared for their missions as they thought best, Satomi and Sumiko’s generation prepared for each mission expecting a total disaster. Faint wrinkles lined the corners of their eyes and mouths; Satomi’s red hair was streaked with gray. Akio’s short red hair was stained with blood and dirt and other unidentifiable substances, but it held no gray; his face was unlined and still retained some baby fat around the cheeks. He held himself despite his injuries with the pride of a young man who, deep down, did not actually want to die.

 

Sumiko and Satomi, on the other hand, looked out at their ravaged city with the eyes of ones who would spit at the Shinigami’s face when he came for them or who would ask him, “What took you so long?” before harnessing his power to wreak some extremely last-minute vengeance against their foes.

 

They were both over fifty years old. They remembered a time when the Elemental Nations were even bloodier than they were now, a time before honorable Senju Hashirama laid out the streets of Konoha in imitation of his wife’s Uzushio and the other lands scrambled to follow suit. They remembered how casually a clan could be hired to wipe out another clan – as apparently hidden village could conspire to wipe out hidden village now.

 

Despite their safer lives in Uzushio, they were children of an era that had known endless war. They may not have grown up in the thick of it as the Senju had, but they had witnessed it. It had shaped their lives to a degree the generations after them could not understand.

 

“Akio-kun, if you would like to help guard the evacuation…” Satomi began, trying not to sound too gentle.

 

Akio tried to smile, but without much luck. “I think I can be most effective right here. If we can bottleneck them, hold them back for as long as we can… that’ll be enough. It’ll have to be.”

 

Sumiko squeezed her eyes momentarily shut, desperately trying not to remember the voices telling her, _It was his choice…. He would have preferred to go out fighting…_

 

Akio paused, glancing at a spot in the distance as checked his chakra sense. “I think they’re emptying out the market district before they come this way.”

 

“Hopefully, they’ll approach in a nice, compact formation and I can blow them to bits.” The ferocity had returned to Satomi’s expression. She knelt down to tap the pavement. Lines of ink briefly appeared, burrowing towards the canal before vanishing under the water.

 

“If they’re Kiri nin, maybe,” huffed Sumiko, privately grateful for her partner-in-crime’s rather bloodthirsty sense of humor even in times like this.

 

Satomi let out a bark of laughter. “I swear, all the Kiri nin I have ever encountered fall into one of two categories: homicidally insane and scarily talented, or…”

 

“…or as dumb as a bag of rocks and with the same amount of skill,” Sumiko finished. The two partners-in-crime traded a fierce grin, decades of shared experiences in that expression.

 

Satomi stood again. “Well, I remotely set some more charges. You handling that side road over there, Sumiko?”

 

Sumiko drifted a few paces to the right. “Yes. I think we have the same idea?”

 

Satomi waved a hand. “Exploding seals under their feet, mass paralysis and stun seals to slow them down, chakra absorption zones, air bursts to redirect any poison clouds back at them, some of Mito’s more terrifying compact barriers – the works?”

 

“Sounds good.”

Akio snorted. “And here I thought you said you had exhausted your bag of tricks, Sumiko-san.”

 

Sumiko bit back another coughing fit, blinking to remove the smoke particles from her eyes. She still managed to sound appropriately smug as she answered, “Ah, but those aren’t tricks, Akio-kun. Those are only the _basics_.”

 

“And you wonder why we poor ninjutsu specialists live in fear of you sealmasters, recreating the world to your whim as you do.” He winced, his posture unconsciously reorienting as his chakra sense pinged at him. “I think they’re regrouping now in the market district.”

 

Sumiko made a vague noise of acknowledgement and resumed slowly walking towards the section of the canal facing the side road Akio had pointed out earlier. The graceful stone arch that had provided a walkway over the canal there had been smashed to pieces earlier when the row of trees in front of the hospital had been ripped up and flung into the water by an overly zealous Kiri invader earlier. He had been flung into the water, too. In several pieces. The seals carven into that arch had reacted in a rather… spectacular manner when the stone shattered.

 

“I wonder if Hiromi is still alive…” Sumiko heard herself murmur.

 

The soft comment did not escape Akio’s ears. “She’ll be all right. She’s a smart girl; she can take care of herself,” he said, as consolingly as he dared. He might have even believed it. “Maybe Chikako will find her.”

 

“Heeeeeeyyyyy,” drawled Satomi, in the unmistakable tone of someone who thinks they have just arrived at a wonderful conclusion. It was a tone of voice that annoying siblings and annoying best friends all over the world have perfected to an art form. “Sumiko, this is it. This is the end,” she said dramatically, even as she continuing setting up fuuinjutsu traps. “You have nothing left to lose now, nothing left to fear. You can confess. Just admit the truth to the whole world. Make me a couple hundred ryo richer and confirm for me now that Hiromi is, in fact, _his_ daughter.”

 

Despite his increasingly tense posture, Akio glanced over expectantly.

 

Sumiko spared a short moment of exasperation over the fact that even people such as Akio who were not very closely connected with her life or her family had an interest in the conspiracy theories over the identity of Hiromi’s father. Come to think of it, most of said conspiracy theories were probably formulated and spread by Satomi herself…

 

 _Ugh. Damn busybody_ , Sumiko thought to herself, without even half of the annoyance she would have liked to put into it. _Mito, at least, was kind enough not to pry. Then again, she was the oldest and the most mature of our little squad… I wonder if news has reached her in Konoha yet._

 

Sumiko’s huff turned into a cough as she caught another lungful of smoke. She dodged the issue as she responded to her longtime partner-in-crime. “Satomi, the other members of your little betting pool aren’t even here for you to collect your winnings, and said winnings would do you no good, anyway.”

 

Despite the situation, Satomi’s face lit up with a ridiculous grin. “But you _do_ finally admit it?!”

 

Still listening to their conversation with half an ear, Akio smothered a laugh with a wince.

 

Sumiko smirked evilly. “I admit to nothing. You will die as you lived, ignorant and unsatisfied.”

 

Satomi made strangling motions in her direction. “You pretentious little…! Fine! It doesn’t matter! You couldn’t fool me with your distractions! I know it _had_ to have been him; he was the only one you were ever sweet on, if you can call plotting together to revoke the laws of reality and shred the space-time continuum being sweet on someone. I’d just like some confirmation here!”

 

“You will have none. None at all.”

 

Satomi’s scream of frustration cut off as Akio began flipping through handseals, calling out, “Incoming!” Instantly serious, she triggered select portions of the invisible seal matrix she had seeded around the area, blowing the first few onrushing Kiri nin sky-high. A stun seal glowed to life on a nearby blood-smeared wall, and a few more dropped. Other seals came to life with small flashes as Akio’s water dragon roared up out of the canal and smashed through the knot of howling invaders.

 

Sumiko’s clan had always held that that water dragon jutsu was but a pale imitation of the real thing, citing legend about the boss of their summons contract. Oh, they still held the contract, yes, but none of them had had the sheer chakra power to summon anything big since Shimizu Sazanami, one of the legendary founders of Uzushio, who had made peace with the Uzumaki over a century ago and sworn allegiance to them when they built their village. The Shimizu had always liked to imagine that their sea dragon slept among the whirlpools and eddies ringing Uzushio, like an extremely badass watchdog.

 

If only the dragon had risen from its slumber to fight the invaders…

 

Sumiko shook her head. Distracted again by sentiment. Angry cries from that approach and the side road indicated that more enemy nin were coming. She sniffed the air again.

 

Ozone.

 

She heaved an internal sigh. Straight to that plan, then. Tearing off a glove, she deadened the pain receptors on her finger and bit through the skin. She carefully traced a sympathetic seal onto the blade of a kunai with her blood, breathing on it in a quick huff to dry it and bond her blood to the kunai’s iron, and tossed the weapon over the canal right into the center of the side road’s egress. The air beginning to hum in her ears, she knelt down and painted her seal array, forcing more blood to her torn finger with her medic-quality chakra control.

 

 _Hah. Maybe if I_ had _been a medic-nin, like most of my clan, I would have gone with the evacuation. Maybe I could have taught Hiromi how to keep herself alive better._ Sumiko sighed. _Maybe… maybe, maybe, maybe. No use indulging in maybes now_.

 

She straightened, staring across the canal at the Kumo nin hurtling down the side road, lightning crackling around them. A stun seal dropped one. The man next to him readied a lightning attack with a roar of defiance – just in time for a rough facsimile of her nerve impulse hijacking seal to glow to life beneath his feet.

 

His body spasmed out of control, falling to the torn pavement and tripping his fellows behind him. They slowed their advance, tossing kunai and tags across the canal. Her barrier seal reversed their weapons’ trajectories and dropped the tags on their heads. They scattered, screaming.

 

Sumiko pursed her lips. _Hmm… the barrier won’t hold for more than a few more of those volleys. It’ll go out with a single raiton. Didn’t have much chakra to put in it_.

 

The deep-seated burn warning her of chakra exhaustion had spread to her limbs – that cold and shaky feeling of the Shinigami’s breath on the back of her neck she had only experienced once or twice before. Blinking did nothing to clear the black spots from her vision. Still, her eyesight was clear enough to spot the glow of lightning chakra gathering around a Kumo nin’s hands.

 

 _Ah, and there’s the raiton._ Sumiko smirked tiredly. _Time to say goodbye, you Kumo bastards. Your deaths might buy Satomi and Akio-kun a few minutes._

 

She flew through a few handseals – no need to call on her clan’s remarkable affinity to water to condense it out of the air when such a large source lay right in front of her in the canal. At the very least, that pseudo kekkei genkai would allow her to be efficient enough with the technique to use it even this low on chakra.

 

 _Hah,_ she thought to herself, as she formed the last seal _. Shimizu Sumiko. Headstrong daughter, aloof sister, know-it-all student, insufferable genius, apathetic teacher, unsympathetic friend, cold lover, grief-crazed researcher, unapproachable mother… I’ve failed at everything other than my techniques, and even those won’t be remembered._

_…Just as well._

She released her jutsu, at the same time triggering the array beneath her feet. The pavement on the opposite side of the canal lit up in an identical pattern around her kunai. Cracks shot through the walk and the walls of the canal, dust rising from the cracks in the surrounding buildings as their foundations heaved. As if blown by the breath of the storm god, the wreckage-strewn waters of the canal rose on high, several times the height of the approaching invaders, and slammed down upon them, swallowing their shrieks. Their own lightning ripped through the water, electrocuting everything it touched. Between water, stone, and lightning, six Kumo nin were buried and the torn bodies crushed to the bottom of the canal.

 

Six down, but so many to go. Sumiko stumbled, her vision nothing more than a rapidly fading blur. Intermittent explosions and the rushing of Akio’s water jutsu drowned out the quiet _fzzzzt_ of Satomi’s seals triggering and the onrush of the next wave of invaders. The airborne dust tore at Sumiko’s throat and nose, just another burning sensation to add to the fire of chakra exhaustion deep in her bones’ marrow.

 

How could her fingers, her skin feel so cold, when she could feel that burning emptiness consuming her from within?

 

Chakra sensing had never been Sumiko’s area of expertise, and any such sense would have been wonky now, as close to the edge as she was. Her vision was all but gone and her hands shaky, but she still stood, and she still had her hearing.

 

The shifting of rubble to her front and right alerted her to a new presence. Sumiko jerked back to avoid a barrage of shuriken; they whistled past her ears as her hand dipped to her pouch in a long-practiced motion and then snapped out. She might not have any pre-prepared paper tags left, but she still had a few kunai already sealed with useful designs. None with that nerve-scrambler. Pity. She’d never find out how well it worked now. After all, she needed at least three trials with it to get a standard deviation and reach a conclusion.

 

A woman’s choked cry and the thud of a toppling body told her that the paralysis seal’s area of effect had claimed another victim. Sumiko liked her version of that seal. It was twice as difficult to negate, even for shinobi with lightning chakra natures. She didn’t believe in doing things halfway, after all. Paralysis should mean paralysis.

 

The whine of a raiton behind Sumiko and Akio’s defiant yelling almost concealed the approach of another shinobi in the paralyzed woman’s path. Drops of water sprayed the area with the force of senbon, settling some of the dust and smoke and rattling on Sumiko’s armor. A choked gurgle behind her barely distracted her; she ordered her hands to form a handseal and hoped they obeyed. Between the numbness of her fingers and the dark blur her vision had become, she couldn’t tell for sure.

 

The seals on her pre-prepared kunai used ink with her blood and chakra, of course. They were already sympathetic. No need to rig a separate seal for that.

 

A twist of her chakra – white-hot pain like a kunai to the gut – and the paralysis seal triggered once more. A man choked and tripped; a splash indicated he had tumbled into the canal.

 

Sumiko fumbled for another of her sealed kunai. An exploratory probe of her chakra – her fingertip throbbed in protest – confirmed it was another paralysis seal. That left the two kunai with explosion seals. Those wouldn’t be reusable, of course. But they were for last-resorts and packed quite a punch.

 

They had been designed for this hour.

 

Sumiko lobbed the paralysis kunai at a suspicious sliding of broken masonry and triggered it. The flare of protest her chakra system put up at this staggered her once more, and she fell on one knee, panting. Satomi’s explosions and Akio’s water jutsu were smoothing into a continuous background roar, little more than an irritation after the white-hot fuzziness enwrapping her senses.

 

More shifting of rubble, the approach of harsh voices. The scream of lightning. A sudden, almighty _whooomph_ as Akio lifted half the water out of the canal and hurled it in a wave of wrath and wreckage across the way. The buzz and crack of other raiton jutsu, the smell of ozone ripping through the air in its path.

 

Again Sumiko reached for a kunai, gritting her teeth and cursing herself when her numb fingers missed her pouch. She tried again, forcing a tiny bit of chakra out to probe the seal to check that the kunai was in her hand, clenched however loosely. Shifting her weight, she tossed it at one of the locations she had noted earlier.

 

A _crack_ and _boom_ of displaced air, thunderously loud even to her fading hearing, signaled that a large-scale raiton jutsu had just been thrown down. This much charge being thrown around wasn’t good for the human body, but Sumiko ignored it. Her heart was beating quickly and erratically; each shallow breath was struggle all on its own. None of it really pained her, though. The gnawing, burning emptiness inside had swallowed all physical sensation, and Sumiko strove against its implacable hunger as she grabbed her last kunai on the third try and sent it soaring towards her target.

 

Gasping, eyes closed, Sumiko let herself fall onto all fours. Jagged bits of rock skittered over her fingers and collided with her legs. Voices inched towards her, faint compared to the roaring silence in her ears. The slick, grimy pavement beneath her hands still pulsed weakly with the seal she had laid down there earlier. If Akio’s small tsunami hadn’t washed away the kunai she used with her earlier detonation, she should be able to cause one last, intense explosion.

 

She reached out for the seal anyway, scraping up the last bits of chakra she could. It responded weakly, still close enough for her to use. The other two kunai she had saved for last had managed to hit close enough to her targets, so that together they formed a triangle before her.

 

She could see the detonation in her mind’s eye. What remained of the walk on both sides of the canal would collapse. The two buildings framing the side road would twist, curling down and inward as the canal bank collapsed. She’d activate the waterspout clause of the seal again if she could, but dropping the ground out from beneath them all and burying them under as many tons of rock as she could took priority.

 

A voice abruptly shouted at her, echoing as if down a long tunnel. A large, sandaled foot smashed into Sumiko’s armored side, knocking her over. Rough laughter danced around her – Kumo nin, if she still had her sense of smell and wasn’t merely imagining the ozone. Several of them.

 

The twitch of Sumiko’s lips would have been a smirk on a better day. The overconfident bastards.

 

_Well, love, I hope I’ve managed to go out with half as much style as you must have. I’ll be seeing you soon._

 

She spread her hand flat on the pavement and pushed the last bit of her life into the lines of the seal on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, Spinner here. Yes, I’ve lost my mind, writing a _Naruto_ fic like this. The world-building urge just got too strong to ignore. 
> 
> As usual, I’ll try to explain my reasoning in my author’s notes; as I like logic, these may get very long and complicated, so feel free to skip them if you like. Fair warning: I may also bounce between English and Japanese terminology. (I’m bilingual, although not with Japanese, so this sort of switching back and forth between languages is just how my brain works now. I’m sorry. Deal with it.) Further fair warning: I’ve looked at canon and have decided to make use of it where it makes sense and make my own sense where it doesn’t. Seriously, the timeline makes me want to pull out my hair, it’s so shining an example of Authors Can’t Do Math. 
> 
> If you see anything you don’t understand, ask me about it! I’ll try to explain in an author’s note. If you see anything glaringly wrong about the Narutoverse, let me know! I’ll try to fix it. Or go into an existential crisis over my inability to fix it, one of the two.
> 
> Yeah, I decided that Uzushio had been standing a while before Konoha. I’m pretty much making up everything about it. Hey, if Kishimoto gave me a blank page, I see fit to scribble what I want. The Shimizu and the Fuyuchi? Totally my invention. They’ll be explained in more detail later. I just figured that the Uzumaki couldn’t have been the only clan in Uzushio. I’ve seen fans suggest that the Uzumaki just adopted everyone who entered their village, but I’d like to think that there were a few minor clans living there as well. However, the Uzumaki were the undisputed rulers of Uzushio, so the Shimizu and the Fuyuchi held a sort of vassal position in regards to them. 
> 
> Also, I don’t in any way, shape, or form speak Japanese, so if you ever see something that looks unbearably weird or even a little bit funky, please let me know. The same goes for Japanese idioms, culture, and other little things I might overlook. These tidbits matter! I’ll also probably be asking for name suggestions in the future, as I seem to have terrible luck with baby name websites. 
> 
> I’ve decided to label this fic M as a precaution, although I don’t plan on including any scenes of incredibly graphic violence, any super-bad language, or any smut. This fic should be mostly T-rated. I just don’t want someone to come whining to me later. Also, all shippers, put down your goggles now, please.
> 
> Spinner, signing out.
> 
> Dead: Uzumaki Akio, Uzumaki Ayako, Uzumaki Satomi, Uzumaki Shinju, Shimizu Akemi, Shimizu Akiko, Shimizu Sumiko
> 
> Relevant Character Death Toll: 7


	2. Aggressive Negotiations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned _Naruto,_ at least I’d be Japanese and I’d be able to come up with better names for OC’s. I’d also pay more attention to linguistics, because one unchanging language for an entire continent over the span of at least 800 years (and possibly including _other planets_ )? Really?
> 
> Edited: 9/2/18.

Hiromi was running.

 

How long she had been running, she could no longer clearly recall. The hours had blended into each other until reality around her had smoothed out into one long continuous nightmare – a torturous dream of running and fighting and running some more and losing someone else in a horrific fashion and then running again, running until she had lost all feeling in her limbs, running until each breath was a burning gasp, running until her vision swam before her eyes and even her chakra sense, so steady and reliable all her life, had begun to tilt like the horizon flipping over on itself.

 

At some point along the way, death had lost all its fear for her.

 

Now, she only hoped to live long enough to reach Konoha and warn the Hokage – or a random gate guard, someone, _anyone_ – before dropping dead.

 

* * *

 

 

 

To think that now death was so close, when less than a week ago war had been a possible to probable future, not the sudden and nightmarish present…

 

Of course Hiromi had recognized that things could go very wrong when she accepted the mission as a medic on one of the escort squads going with the diplomatic couriers to the border of the Land of Frost. (Uzushio held a pact of non-aggression with the Land of Hot Water, as did Konoha; Kumo held a pact of non-aggression with the Land of Frost. The two great nations had agreed to exchange missives at the halfway point, the border of Frost and Hot Water. Neither Kumo nor Uzushio exactly wanted a ship from the other nation landing in their home ports at this time.) Things could go wrong on any mission. The higher stakes of this mission merely made the consequences more severe. They had all been briefed accordingly.

 

In her mental preparations for worst-case scenarios, Hiromi had imagined having to make a quick getaway from the border after the actual courier squad failed to be diplomatic enough. Maybe the Kumo envoys they were due to meet would not be overly concerned with staying in their territory, or maybe they would try to pick a fight with the Uzushio nin so they could claim the Uzumaki had initiated hostilities. Maybe the Uzushio squads would encounter interference from shinobi from other nations who wanted to stir up trouble between Uzushio and Kumo. Maybe they would just have ugly luck and run into a pack of ill-tempered nuke-nin.

 

Never in her wildest dreams had she expected to be ambushed by several squads of Kumo nin carefully selected to wipe them out in one blow, or to escape with a few others by the skin of their teeth and then flee for their lives south with Kumo’s invasion force on their heels.

 

When had it all gone wrong?

 

_I’m sorry, kaa-chan, but I don’t think I’ll be making it home this time…_

 

Hiromi grit her teeth at the realization that she had unconsciously fallen back on the usage of ‘kaa-chan’. She hadn’t done that in years. At the age of fourteen, so overcome with second-hand embarrassment at her mother’s rudeness, she had made a private vow to be the epitome of calm politeness for the rest of her life. All right, so her mother wasn’t rude _all_ the time, but she only ever took pains to properly address those whom she liked and/or respected, and she took a little too much enjoyment sometimes in insulting those whose opinions she disregarded. She had made plenty of unfriendly rivals and enemies that way, and Hiromi hadn’t wanted that legacy to overshadow her for the rest of her life.

 

She had enough rumors and possible legacies overshadowing her as it was.

 

Fine, maybe her okaa-san had actually seemed a bit hurt when she switched to addressing her more formally, and, fine, maybe Hiromi did still harbor a bit of guilt over that fact. However, for goodness’ sakes, Hiromi had put up with enough emotional constipation (as Satomi-oba-san termed it) and evasiveness from her mother that the woman could hardly be surprised that her daughter had finally become too frustrated by it all.

 

The damn conspiracy theories about her father’s _real_ identity were merely the icing on the cake. (And, yes, Hiromi would continue to call them ‘the damn conspiracy theories’ as long as she lived – which might not be very long now, but the point still stood. Part of her politeness vow included shunning coarse language, but she felt she _had_ to make an exception in this case. The situation was that stupid and that annoying.)

 

Come to think of it, Satomi-oba-san was probably the mastermind behind spreading half of said conspiracy theories. Although Hiromi dearly loved the woman who had taught her so many things and had been the ‘fun aunt’ or almost a second mother during her childhood, she would never be her favorite aunt, for this and other reasons.

 

But that was a gripe for another time.

 

Nine of them had set out from Uzushio, and nine of them had approached the border of the Land of Frost, split into their three squads. Hiromi’s squad had been the furthest from the epicenter of the ambush. After the two escort squads had positioned themselves, the three nin acting as the actual couriers had walked forward openly to meet the four Kumo nin standing out in the open to receive them. Identities had been confirmed and diplomatic pleasantries had been exchanged.

 

Hiromi’s official role on this mission was to act as a medic, but her sensing abilities had pretty clearly also been a factor in her selection for the mission. Granted, she might not have the same incredible range or insane precision of the Mind’s Eye of the Kagura sensing technique that popped up fairly frequently in the Uzumaki Clan, but her chakra sensing was nonpareil in its quality. She could identify individual chakra signatures without fail and never forgot them once sensed, and as for chakra type? Right on the ryo every time. Chikako-kouhai might be super-sensitive to fluctuations in chakra enough to detect lying and subtle genjutsu, but Hiromi could tell you what clan someone belonged to and what elemental type chakra they were molding, all without laying eyes on them once.

 

Therefore, her squad leader, Uzumaki Tokara, had parked their little group slightly further away from the designated meeting place of the diplomatic couriers and ordered her to monitor the proceedings. Hiromi had crouched and touched two fingers to the ground, threading out just a sliver of her chakra with the precision of long practice and brushing it against the nature chakra of her surroundings. Yes, her chakra sense worked on different principles than the Uzumaki Mind’s Eye of the Kagura. Fortunately, this time the mission was too important and everyone too keyed-up for anyone to make a comment about it. Speaking of which, the other escort squad had an Uzumaki with the Mind’s Eye, who was similarly monitoring the situation. Sensors always knew when another of their kind was around.

 

Between the two of them, there should have been no surprises.

 

Between the two of them, they should have had enough warning to pull out.

 

As it turned out, a little warning was not enough warning.

 

The Uzumaki sensor twitched first, either thrown off by something in the chakra of the four Kumo nin standing out in the open or perhaps picking up on the rapid approach of other hostiles. His chakra pulsed a warning, forgoing subtlety to send the message to all nine Uzushio nin. Barely a moment later, a horde of lightning-type chakra signatures registered on Hiromi’s senses, rushing towards their position so quickly it felt as if a thundercloud had decided to swoop down upon them.

 

“Give cover and pull out!” Tokara-taichou barked, not bothering with hand signals now that the mission had just gone beyond sour. The captain of the other escort squad must have given a similar order, because one of the Uzumaki flung a wall of water at the four Kumo nin out in the open. It crashed down upon them just as they were whipping out kunai or readying jutsu, stunning them long enough for the three Uzushio nin in front of them to back out of close range.

 

Maybe the risk of electrocuting their own men would make the oncoming Kumo nin a little less eager to throw around raiton jutsu?

 

“Four squads of four incoming, solid lightning signatures, semicircle formation,” Hiromi passed on, a kunai clenched on one hand to deflect any projectiles. “Others behind them.”

 

“Matsuri! Dokugiri once we’ve got some distance. Slow ‘em down!”

 

Uzumaki Matsuri didn’t bother with verbal acknowledgement, already raining poisoned senbon on the four Kumo nin recovering from the wall of water that had slammed them in the face. As they scattered to avoid the needles, the leader of the three Uzushio couriers crouched and slammed his hands on the ground. Black ink lines wove into a large circular seal, pumped with so much chakra they shone as white-hot lines to Hiromi’s senses. The paralysis effect of the seal was so strong all four nin dropped. The sealing specialist slapped an addition down and leapt back, joining his two comrades dashing for the support of the other two squads.

 

“A minute and a half, tops,” Hiromi warned, concentrating on the Kumo backup. Her senses might not be quite as sharp without the crutch of touching her fingers to the ground – her equivalent of a handseal focus – but she retained enough awareness of the swiftly approaching deadline.

 

Her red braid swinging, Matsuri lobbed a tagged kunai into the center of the paralysis seal. On impact the tag tied to the kunai’s ring triggered, an enormous purple cloud exploding up and outwards to envelop the area. Based on the squad leader’s orders, it had to have been her nasty delaying poison, the one that attacked all the senses and put the brakes on reaction time. Luckily, the wind was favoring them right now: the air was calm, no breeze to disperse either the poison or the smoke-like colored particles Matsuri had added to the poison blend to decrease visibility.

 

Would it be too much to ask that the oncoming Kumo backup all ran straight into that cloud?

 

Not satisfied with that one cloud of death, Matsuri tossed out several more tags as they pulled back, only triggering a couple of them to further decrease visibility and increase the chances of their pursuers stumbling into her poison. She used the same purple additive in all of her poisons so that no enemy could distinguish between clouds of poison designed to delay, such as the one she had first tossed out, and those designed for more immediate lethality.

 

Meanwhile, another of the three couriers was similarly tossing out explosive tags like candy, not activating them either but just seeding the area in preparation to utterly blow it up. Some tags had been written on slips of paper; others appeared when he tapped a rock formation as he passed or materialized in his footsteps as he ran. Uzumaki Araya. Hiromi might not have run any missions with him before, but she was acquainted with him thanks to all the times he had followed Satomi-oba-san and her okaa-san around begging for fuuinjutsu tips. (Was he _crazy_ , pestering her okaa-san like that?) Satomi-oba-san liked to tease Hiromi about him, drawing attention to his red ponytail and big gray eyes and suggesting that he’d make good boyfriend material.

 

Yes. Another reason why Satomi-oba-san was not her favorite oba-san.

 

Especially because her teasing had held some truth to it.

 

“One minute,” Hiromi called. “Aiming for a pincer now.”

 

The three Uzushio squads had drawn close enough for shouted communication or for hand signals, although they still maintained enough distance to avoid all being taken out by a large-scale direct attack. Fuyuchi Kanna, the leader of the other escort squad, signed: _Message home. Go. Delay_.

 

She was offering to hold her squad back to buy enough time for the other two squads to put enough distance between themselves and the approaching Kumo backup to possibly make it back to Uzushio.

 

The leader of the courier squad and overall leader of the mission, Uzumaki Keisuke, visibly grimaced, the expression made more dramatic by the way it pulled on the scar on his cheek. His hands blurring through handseals, he formed two water clones and sent them off, presumably to lay down more seals like the paralysis seal he had slapped down earlier. Finally, he signed back: _Not yet_. _Delay. Pull back._

 

Clouds of poison began to bloom on either side of them, far enough away and expanding rapidly enough that the approaching Kumo nin would surely waste a few seconds dodging them. At least poison could be relied upon as a distinct advantage against Kumo nin. A good portion of Kiri nin used poison themselves and either had built up a tolerance to the more common poisons or wore rebreathers to protect themselves. Kumo nin were much less likely to use or be prepared for those situations.

 

“Blow the place to hell?” Araya suggested, with far too much cheer and with far too much breath for a guy who had spent the last half-minute running around like a crazy person touching every available surface and leaving explosives behind.

 

“Kie, mud clones,” Keisuke snapped to the other member of his squad, forming several more water clones himself. “As little chakra as possible. Decoys only.”

 

Catching on to the plan, Kanna added a water clone of herself into the mix before holding out her hand. Ice crystallized into a slightly curved, perfectly formed blade in her hand. Her pale eyes glittered with rage, the little sparks of light starting to swirl in the air around her indicating she was pulling out her infamous Ice Sliver Cloak. Hiromi had seen her in action with it before. The kenjutsu mistress could kill with it alone, turning any close encounter with her into a chance to die via a thousand cuts. Just after finishing those handseals, she signed an additional order to a member of her squad.

 

“Clones?” Hiromi suggested to her own squad leader. Her Shimizu pseudo kekkei genkai that made her so chakra-efficient at suiton jutsu would give them three decoy water clones for the least chakra out of the three members of the squad, and she had more chakra to burn than the average Shimizu.

 

Tokara-taichou grunted his assent. “Kumo – any sensors?”

 

“Doubt it. But they planned for ours,” Hiromi responded, as her hands came together in the Tiger seal and three water clones emerged, pitiful shells of chakra constructs that only needed to give the Kumo nin human-sized targets to run towards. The clones would remain coherent long enough for them to get out of the range of Araya’s blast and that’d be it.

 

Nine clones were now running alongside and among the three squads. Only Keisuke could have balanced a henge on top of the original clone technique, but he hadn’t bothered. On the other side of him, the clanless member of Kanna’s squad – Sagiri, if she remembered correctly from the briefing - was focusing his chakra intensely and spreading it out around them. Strange, it was suiton-based instead of a sensory technique…

 

Moments later, his intent became clear. In a unique manifestation of the technique, he did not spew mist from his mouth or collect it around him from no discernible water source; instead, it appeared as if his chakra had reached to the heavens and lowered a cloud down to the earth to cover them in cold, suffocating dampness.

 

Hiromi could not fully suppress a tense grin. _Kirigakure no jutsu_. She’d always wanted to learn that technique, but she hadn’t gotten any farther than skimming through a scroll on it before her attention was diverted to a new medical jutsu. If they lived through this, she was definitely going to beg Sagiri to teach it to her.

 

“Twenty seconds,” she called.

 

With a flick of his hand, Keisuke indicated for all three squads to pull ahead of their decoy clones. Incredibly, Sagiri held his jutsu as they sped, spreading it further and further to disguise both their own positions as well as that of the clone squads. His entire chakra system seemed concentrated on maintaining the jutsu, but it was still an amazing feat. Opaque white mist was rolling over dozens of acres by now, the chakra in it smudging any chakra traces of Matsuri’s untriggered poison tags and Araya’s explosives as well as hiding them from view.

 

As the seconds flew by, Hiromi focused on the approaching bursts of human-shaped lightning in her senses. The Kumo nin had reached the minefield by now, so to speak, and were taking evasive maneuvers trying to dodge Matsuri’s clouds of poison. Before long, they would reach the point where Araya had begun littering the ground with explosive tags. They probably expected something of the sort, but their desire to prevent word from reaching Uzushio outweighed caution. If they maintained the same rapid pace, they should converge on the clone squads’ position as planned.

 

One Kumo squad had pulled a little ahead of the others in the confusion of the poison clouds and had almost plunged into Sagiri’s mist. With no apparent sensors or wind-type shinobi to clear the visual obstacles, the Kumo nin were doing their best to guess the Uzushio nin’s positions. So far, their guesswork had not been too shabby. That squad could cause them some trouble still, even if they managed to lose the others in the maze of mist and poison clouds.

 

Araya held up a hand and signaled: _Explosion._ The Uzushio nin immediately cycled chakra to their ears in the reverse of an enhancing technique, instead deadening their hearing so the imminent explosion would not blow out their eardrums. It was a technique swiftly learned by anyone on a squad with someone as explosion-happy as Araya.

 

To anyone actually listening, the thunder of the explosion two seconds later would have rivaled some of the finest examples from nature’s thunderstorms.

 

Without glancing behind her, Hiromi could watch the area around their decoy clones – a couple of them already popped either by the distance from the user or by the Kumo nin. It was a grand show. In several places, it seemed as if patches of the ground had just decided to throw themselves in the air and disintegrate. Boulders detonated. The smoke-like purple additive in Matsuri’s poison clouds – already pushed away by Araya’s first blast – then ignited, slamming walls of super-heated air further outwards. The few trees unfortunate enough to be nearby twisted and splintered.

 

The area had been, as Araya said, blown to hell.

 

 _Five dead_ , Hiromi reported, the ground still shaking.

 

 _Four incoming_ , the Uzumaki sensor on Kanna’s time signed a heartbeat later. _Other squads behind._ The closest squad of Kumo nin had made it through the explosions and had adjusted their course away from the source – unfortunately right in their direction.

 

Several seconds later, the four nin burst from the curtains of white mist almost right into their midst, between Keisuke’s squad and Kanna’s. With a terrifying laugh, Kanna amped up her Ice Sliver Cloak to its full power and threw herself at them, shielding Sagiri so he could maintain the Hiding in the Mist jutsu. Before he registered what was upon him, one of the Kumo nin had been cut down. The next blocked Kanna’s ice blade with a kunai, grunting as the wicked-sharp slivers of ice from her cloak jutsu cut through his clothing where it wasn’t covered by arm or shin guards and flak jacket.

 

In Keisuke’s squad, Kie simply dropped into the ground as if it had swallowed him up, leaving the third Kumo nin who had lunged towards him with lightning coating his hand aiming at nothing. He recovered swiftly, however, electricity racing up his arm and across his shoulders.

 

Meanwhile, the fourth Kumo nin behind him hurriedly flipped through handseals, ending with Tiger. Violet discs of electricity formed around him, whining ominously before spinning out in all directions. Araya batted one out of the air with a tagged kunai, not one of his explosion seals for once. The disc blinked out like a snuffed candle. Already dodging the Kumo nin coating himself in electricity, Keisuke could not dodge the disc homing in on him, which struck him in the chest plate of his traditional armor. A few seals inscribed on it lit up, indicating that part of the raiton had been absorbed; the remainder was enough to drive him to his knees as it electrocuted him.

 

The Kumo nin covering himself bit by bit in electricity reached down to grab Keisuke by the face and finish him off – only Kie’s hands emerged from the ground at his feet, grabbing him by the ankles and submerging him in dirt up to his neck. The earth around him crumbled as the electricity he had been building up discharged into it.

 

An indirect lightning strike. Hiromi winced.

 

Matsuri managed to take out another of the spinning discs of violent lightning; although her tagged kunai weren’t as effective as whatever Araya was using, her chakra in them was still sufficient to disrupt that of the Kumo nin’s. Hiromi just sidestepped them as best she could. Dodging three discs that zoomed relentlessly after him, Araya knocked another out of the air and, in a risky move, slapped a chakra-formed seal on a fifth with his bare hand as it raced straight for his face. It blinked out. He seemed as surprised as anyone else that it had actually worked.

 

As the Kumo nin who had tried to engage Kanna in close combat fell dead with slivers of ice sticking out of his eyes, three chakra-conducting metal rods slammed into the ground around the nin flinging discs of lightning at everyone.

 

“Fuuinjutsu: Chakra-Reflecting Prison,” announced the Uzumaki sensor – Shira, that was his name – as he knelt with his hands flat on the ground. His red moustache and beard lit up in the blue glow of the chakra walls that sprang up between the metal rods and encased the lightning-disc-throwing shinobi.

 

Perhaps thinking to break out of the prison or maybe just unable to react in time, the man still let loose his next barrage. The violent discs slammed into the chakra walls of the barrier, experienced some sort of chakra conversion, and bounced back on him. He screamed as his own jutsu electrocuted him, thrashing until one of his flailing legs hit the walls of his prison – which apparently converted all of his chakra into something hostile and killed him instantly.

 

“Fuuinjutsu: Chakra Absorption,” Keisuke said weakly a moment later, pulling himself together enough to imprint a memorized seal on the ground around the shinobi Kie had buried. The black lines lit up as they absorbed chakra straight from his system, glowing brighter and brighter as he howled in agony. With a blinding white flash, the howling stopped and the seal disintegrated.

 

With a pained grunt, Keisuke lifted his hands and gingerly sat back on his heels. Looking much the worse for wear, Kie crawled out of the earth behind him. Now that the coast was clear, Hiromi darted over to reverse the effects of the electrocution for the both of them. As she worked, Shira collected his chakra-conducting rods from the ground around the Kumo nin’s still-smoking body, paying it no attention.

 

Around them, the mist that had been dispersed during the brief fight slowly flowed back into place.

 

 _Seven coming_ , Shira warned, still holding the rods in his hand instead of returning them to the bag slung at the back of his waist next to the more standard kunai pouch. He, Keisuke, and Kanna still wore the traditional armor of metal plates – which, at least in Uzushio, were additionally inscribed with various seals for even greater protection. Those three were old-fashioned that way. And old, but Hiromi wouldn’t have added that last part aloud to their faces.

 

 _Reinforcements?_ signed Keisuke, breathing easier now that Hiromi had finished healing him and moved on to Kie.

 

Shira focused, eyes closing in concentration as he expanded his sensory range as far as it would go. _Nothing yet_ , he responded. Rolling the rods in one hand in a seemingly idle gesture, he added, _Capture?_

 

 _Kumo message clear enough_ , Keisuke decided. It wasn’t worth the time and trouble to capture and interrogate a Kumo nin for further information on their plans when Kumo had made their aggressive intentions clear enough by ambushing a courier squad with over six times its number of men. Quite simply, Kumo meant war.

 

Also, they really didn’t have the time for capture and interrogation. They needed to bring back word to Uzushio posthaste.

 

 _Explosion?_ signaled Araya hopefully, holding out his other hand to help Keisuke to his feet. For once, Keisuke accepted the gesture of assistance. He indicated for Araya to wait and conferred with Shira on the exact positions and movements of the five Kumo nin still searching for them in the mist. While they debated, sometimes in hand signals and sometimes in hushed words, Hiromi finished treating Kie, who still looked a little rough.

 

“Thanks,” he murmured. Hiromi patted him on the shoulder and returned to her squad.

 

In the end, Keisuke chose the simplest option for their first method of attack. Under Shira’s guidance, Matsuri crept close to where the seven remaining Kumo nin who had survived Araya’s blast were trying to claw their way out of Sagiri’s mist. She tossed a small sachet near their feet and quickly pulled back, Shira returning her to their squad members. She did not use them often, but she _did_ carry a few poison blends without the purple additive. On hitting the ground, the satchet would burst open and release an invisible, odorless cloud of poison, hopefully thinning their opposition with minimal fuss.

 

In normal situations, Matsuri might not have been as liberal with the poison clouds as she was now, since the risk of her own teammates getting caught in them was so real. However, she had built up an immunity to her own poisons, and for Hiromi, a medic who had trained under Shimizu Akemi herself, flushing the toxins out of her system was child’s play. Additionally, long years of warfare with Kiri had ensured that a scarf or mask of some sort marked with air-filtering seals was standard-issue for Uzushio nin.

 

Once again, it all came down to the fact that they were much more prepared to deal with poison than the Kumo nin.

 

 _One dead_ , Shira signed as they approached the other Uzushio nin. _Others on move_.

 

While Matsuri and Shira were away, Keisuke had shuffled the squads around, pulling aside Kie, Araya, and Hiromi. With his doton jutsu’s disadvantage to raiton, Kie was the least offensive help right now, and Hiromi as a medic would be extremely valuable in the upcoming war. (Keisuke did not speculate that Kumo was going to war; he _knew_ Kumo was going to war.) He wanted to send them on ahead with the news to Uzushiogakure if the worst came to the worst. The other squad members were more suited to outright combat and stood a better chance of buying them time.

 

Shira and Hiromi stiffened at the same time. All this time, they’d been aware of other Kumo squads behind the first wave, but their immediate priority had been to fight off the front squads and give themselves time and cushion room to run away. It had seemed possible; the second wave of Kumo nin had been in no hurry, perhaps confident that the first group could ambush and wipe out the Uzushio nin in one fell stroke. However, that complacency must have been shattered. It was pointless to guess what had tipped them off – had they realized the barrage of explosions was not their own? Had they spotted the poison clouds or had they brought their own sensor? Had their advance squads failed to check in?

 

 _Five more squads_ , Shira signed quickly. _Even more behind them._

_More?_ Keisuke signed incredulously.

 

 _Army_ , Shira replied.

 

Hiromi could only concur. More and more unfamiliar chakra signatures teemed at the edge of her sensing range, rushing headlong through the Land of Frost and approaching the border with the Land of Hot Water. The squads closer to them had picked up speed, abandoning the swift but steady pace of a shinobi headed out on a mission for a blitzing pace that would quickly overtake them.

 

 _It really is war_ , she realized. _They ambushed us in hopes we wouldn’t be able to give a warning and already mobilized their forces to maintain the element of surprise. They_ really _don’t want us getting away. But who is their target: the Land of Fire… or us?_

 

Their situation soured even further when, a few kilometers to the west, a group of jounin-level chakra signatures stopped masking their presence and leapt into motion. They must have been hiding along their projected route through the Land of Hot Water, ready to act if any Uzushio nin escaped the ambush. Alerted, they swept towards their targets as surely as if they had a sensor in the group.

 

Hiromi swallowed, one of the few facts she knew for sure about her father looming in the forefront of her mind.

 

_Otou-san… it looks like I’m gonna die the same way as you._

 

More fiercely this time, Kanna signaled her offer to hold their pursuers off while the rest made a break for it. With an anguished grimace, Keisuke signaled back his approval. Hiromi could only imagine how hard it was for him to agree to that plan. Regardless of anyone he personally might have lost on missions or during the Great War (soon to be known as the First War, Hiromi was sure), Uzumaki were notoriously averse to abandoning comrades. They had embraced everyone who had joined their city as family, and to the Uzumaki ‘family’ meant that no one was left behind.

 

And then the six remaining members of the first wave of Kumo nin burst out of the mist, bursts of lightning preceding them. The Uzushio nin scattered, some making a break for it as ordered and the rest going on the defensive or offensive as their specialties dictated.

 

With a slash of her hand, Kanna flung small spears of ice at the attackers. Most dodged, but one took an icicle to the knee and stumbled. An icicle from Kanna’s second volley slammed into his chest, piercing his flak jacket as if it were no thicker than his clothing and rupturing his heart. Meanwhile, Keisuke pulled a couple of scrolls from the holsters on his belt and, biting his thumb, smeared blood across them. For a moment, Hiromi caught her breath, imagining that Keisuke had signed a summons contract with one of the two famous Uzumaki animal summons clans, the tigers and the cattle. What she wouldn’t give to see a giant red bull appear snorting and pawing in a cloud of chakra smoke before charging and tossing Kumo nin over its hump with its giant horns…

 

No such salvation appeared.

 

Whatever Keisuke actually planned to do with the scroll, however, Hiromi never saw. As she turned to run, out of the corner of her eye she saw Matsuri and Kie trade places with a nod. A determined scowl on his usually unassuming face, Kie wove hand signs as he stepped back to Keisuke’s group and slapped his hands on the ground. His chakra clove the ground like a giant cleaver, ripping it apart beneath the feet of their attackers. Screams of pain drowned out the hiss of ice through the air and only served to make Kanna’s battle taunts that much more bloodthirsty and terrifying. Sagiri had dropped the Hiding in Mist jutsu in order to provide covering fire with shuriken and other projectiles.

 

“Let’s go,” Matsuri mouthed, touching Hiromi’s shoulder as she darted past. Araya lobbed one more kunai at the Kumo attackers and fell into stride alongside her. A moment or two later, after a bark from Keisuke, Kie fell back and chased after them.

 

Although she should be focusing on their route and any possible obstacles as the only sensor in the fleeing group, Hiromi was distracted. She could not help but keep her senses trained on those they were leaving behind. Keisuke’s and Shira’s chakra were steady beacons, never seeming to waver despite jutsu use and injury. ( _What could I possibly tell their families, if I make it back?)_ Tokara’s signature was almost as strong as theirs. ( _I’m sorry, taichou. Did I ever make you proud?)_ Kanna’s was a freezing whirlwind, extinguishing the signatures of attackers around her like a winter wind blowing out the flames of candles left before a shrine. ( _Why can’t I be as brave as her?)_ Sagiri’s chakra held on for a while, and then in a burst of lightning chakra that echoed after it blinked out. ( _Rest easy. Uzushio will not forget you.)_

 

And then from the west the group of Kumo nin that had cloaked their presence were joined by another squad, and Hiromi dragged her attention reluctantly to them. She was the sensor and medic. She had to keep Araya, Matsuri, and Kie alive. She had to make it back to Uzushio.

 

No. She didn’t. But someone had to.

 

 _Otou-san… I’ll die as you did, but just let me save them. I don’t want to leave them behind_.

 

Hiromi was realistic enough, however, to calculate their odds as not very promising. She herself stood firmly in the support class of shinobi with her skills as a medic and sensor; the couple of suiton jutsu under her belt and her proficiency in dodging – something every Shimizu medic was relentlessly drilled in – meant she wouldn’t be a total liability in a straight-out fight, but it wasn’t enough to pull them out of this. Araya’s talents lay more in covert operations; he was less of a combat-ready sealing specialist than Keisuke and Shira were – especially Shira, with his concentration in barrier fuuinjutsu. Araya was a sealing specialist after Hiromi’s okaa-san’s heart – the type to lay down a bunch of explosions and traps and then listen eagerly to the agonized screams. He didn’t laugh evilly, though, unlike her okaa-san. Matsuri and her poisons also counted as a support nin, even though her taijutsu was decent – enough sparring between the two of them assured Hiromi of that fact. Kie’s skillset she was not familiar with.

 

Matsuri pitched a poison sachet towards the two squads approaching from the west. Araya followed up with some tagged kunai, probably explosives. Just how many of those had he prepared? Hiromi had thought he seemed a little overboard with the number of pouches he was carrying and the other gear he had to have stowed away in various storage scrolls and seals inked on his arms, but now she was grateful for his preparedness.

 

 _I will never dismiss okaa-san’s rule of ‘Pack everything but the kitchen sink’ ever again_ , she promised herself.

 

With that thought she recalled the nerve-hijacking seal her mother had pressed on her the night before she left Uzushio. A nerve-scrambling technique had been in the works in the iryou-ninjutsu division of Uzushio’s research and development department; she remembered reading about it in the published journal. Momentarily, Hiromi wondered if her mother had read the same journal and set out to recreate the technique with fuuinjutsu, or if she had dreamed it up all by herself like she did her other brilliantly insane seals.

 

That seal would require contact, though. She couldn’t just tie it to a kunai and let it fly. Pity.

 

One of the eight onrushing Kumo nin blipped out on her chakra sense as Araya’s tagged kunai exploded in the distance. Cycling protective chakra to her eardrums was instinctive for Hiromi, growing up as she had with a mother who couldn’t keep any plants alive in the small patch of land behind their house because she blew it up so frequently testing seals she really should have taken to designated testing grounds. Matsuri rolled a small purple ball between her fingers as she ran. Knowing her, she probably still had another entire bag of them.

 

Hiromi had come overprepared with medical supplies, true, but it all suddenly felt so inadequate.

 

At her side, Kie flashed through hand signs and paused momentarily to clap his hands to a damp patch of earth. His chakra reeled as the earth greedily sucked it up and churned into mud. Two canine shapes clawed their way out of the mud and raced for the oncoming Kumo nin. One was almost immediately blasted into pieces by a lightning strike; the other circled the enemy shinobi and nipped at their heels. With a grunt of exertion and a flare of chakra, Kie reformed the mud wolf that had been disintegrated. It leapt upon the nearest enemy nin, startling her and throwing her off balance. A couple of shuriken flung by Araya forced the nin to her right back towards her, and one of his tagged kunai landed between them in the next moment, detonating immediately.

 

The fragmentation and disappearance of the woman’s chakra signature told Hiromi that she’d been scattered into pieces; although feebly twitching, the man’s signature indicated he probably would not be getting back up again soon. The other five Kumo nin had received no debilitating injuries, having managed to jump clear in time. One of them began molding chakra – doton – while two others drew weapons and charged under the cover of another’s raiton jutsu. The fifth created a rock clone and substituted with it, burrowing into the earth and waiting for the opportunity to strike.

 

Abandoning his mud wolves, Kie erected a sacrificial wall of earth just large enough to block the incoming lightning. Long red braid flying, Matsuri drew her tantou. Araya harried the distant raiton user with a few projectiles that were smugly dodged – or blasted out of the air with small bursts of lightning.

 

 _What a show-off_ , Hiromi grumbled to herself, delaying one of the two Kumo kenjutsu users for Matsuri with a water needle jutsu. She might not have put a lot of power behind it, but she had accuracy, and he was forced to duck and defend instead of overwhelming Matsuri two-on-one.

 

And then the Kumo nin underground exploded out of the earth behind her.

 

Hiromi jerked back, narrowly avoiding the swipes from the two kunai he held in either hand. She’d kept her dodging skills sharp by sparring with her friends, but he was fast, faster than almost anything she’d encountered before. She fed chakra to the tenketsu in her hands, one chakra scalpel flaring to life. The Kumo nin – jounin, had to be jounin – barely blinked, lunging at her again with a flurry of kicks and slashes that drove her back, and back – and there was his rock clone, ready and waiting to pin her between them.

 

With no handseals or jutsu name to focus her chakra, Hiromi spit out a couple of pathetically weak water needles. They couldn’t have pierced a flak jacket, but they zeroed in on the jounin’s face, forcing him to defend. Hiromi had just enough breathing space to slip past the rock clone, weaving handseals as she went.

 

_Dragon, Tiger, Hare… Suiton: Mizurappa!_

Enough chakra backed the water trumpet to completely soak the rock clone, staggering it. Not enough to break it apart, unfortunately, especially with the chakra nature disadvantage, but Hiromi hadn’t expected it to. She swerved as the jounin barreled at her again, hand darting lightning-quick to her scroll holsters for one of her heavy-duty paralysis seals. Her okaa-san might have been too hung up on the past to teach her the basics of fuuinjutsu, but Hiromi couldn’t have become a Shimizu medic without a thorough grounding in it. And she _might_ have rummaged through her okaa-san’s workspace once or twice – or, fine, on several occasions – and swiped a design or two for her own usage.

 

A double paralysis seal with a chakra suppression component? _Nasty_. Hiromi had had vague ideas of coopting it for medical usage on particularly troublesome patients, but this rather terrifying Kumo jounin would serve just as well.

 

A shallow cut opened up on Hiromi’s left arm, the sudden pain breaking her concentration long enough for the chakra scalpel to fizzle. She dipped to avoid the follow-up strike and slammed the paralysis scroll on the ground, shoving chakra into it so abruptly she hoped it wouldn’t overload. Her okaa-san’s design was tougher than that, however.

 

 _Fzzt_.

 

Anticlimactically, the Kumo jounin collapsed.

 

His rock clone had no such inhibitions, however. Hiromi turned her crouch into a spring, vaulting over the fallen jounin and thinking frantically. Chakra scalpels wouldn’t do much good against a rock clone, and most of her fuunjutsu scrolls were medically-oriented rather than all-purpose havoc. In the distance, Matsuri was still desperately fending off the two kenjutsu wielders at once while Kie and Araya were barely managing to hold their own against the remaining two attackers. She needed to get to Matsuri’s aid.

 

As another Kumo squad lit up on the borders of her chakra sense, the rock clone got in a solid blow to Hiromi’s ribs. Clamping down on the pain and the small, shameful part of her that wanted to roll into a ball and cradle the injury, Hiromi turned her hiss of pain into a determined frown. She aborted the instinctive reach for healing chakra and diverted it to suiton. Her chakra coils happily processed the request, and she channeled her pain and desperation into a violent water wave.

 

Less precise than her water needles, of course, and thus counter to everything she’d been taught and believed, but it did its job. The rock clone was swept off its feet, and the swirling momentum of the water crumbled its extremities. Pushing herself forward, Hiromi modulated her chakra to a frequency destructive to that of the earth-natured chakra and hit the flailing clone with it.

 

The exact opposite of an iryou-ninjutsu. The clone disintegrated.

 

Hiromi flashed a brief pulse of healing chakra to her ribs, ignoring the sluggishly bleeding cut on her forearm, and finished off the paralyzed jounin before doubling back to Matsuri’s aid. Kenjutsu was not her forte and her distressed chakra told of multiple injuries, but she’d managed to keep her two attackers at arm’s length so far. Amidst the commotion, Hiromi had heard the distinctive soft cough of Matsuri breathing out an extremely small poison cloud in her opponents’ faces.

 

Hardened shinobi or not, it could still be a bit disconcerting when a pretty little redheaded kunoichi suddenly vomits purple poisonous gas in your face.

 

This time with the aid of handseals, Hiromi spat almost a dozen water needles at the kenjutsu pair. Two needles embedded themselves in the sword-wielding kunoichi’s arm and one in her thigh, slowing her enough for Matsuri to force her temporarily back and focus on her male partner. Behind her, Araya was standing over a wounded Kie, peppering the two long-range ninjutsu users with small explosions while they dodged and returned fire.

 

Somewhere in the distance, that Kumo squad must have picked up traces of the commotion and were now venturing this way. Seriously, how much manpower did Kumo devote to wiping out nine Uzushio shinobi?

 

 _Heh… I guess they have experience in doing this sort of thing, right, otou-san?_ With that wry thought, Hiromi flicked a handful of actual senbon at the sword-wielding Kumo kunoichi, harrying her as she closed in. Frustration sparked her chakra like a firework sparkling. _Raiton, huh?_

 

Slipping out the unique tag she had tucked in her belt, Hiromi fed a little more chakra to her legs and shot forward. The kunoichi lashed out at her with her blade but clearly didn’t expect the sudden turn of speed, her backhanded strike going wide. Hiromi slapped her okaa-san’s nerve-hijacking seal on the dark skin of the kunoichi’s bare upper arm and sprang back. The woman’s chakra signature churned like a whirlpool back home, a choked cry escaping her lips as her own chakra system turned against her. Her body slumped to the ground, her sword landing next to her.

 

Hiromi could not repress a shiver. She had assumed the seal tag merely scrambled nerve impulses and severely uncoordinated its target, like the technique she had read about. She should have known better. Her okaa-san had taken one look at that and decided, “I can make it worse,” and included a conversion element that turned hostile the yang chakra produced partly by the nervous system.

 

 _Nasty_.

 

A pain-filled chakra flare from Matsuri averted Hiromi’s train of thought. Once they reached safety – _if_ they reached safety – both Matsuri and Kie would need a good healing session. While forming a couple of handseals and firing off some more water needles at Matsuri’s remaining attacker, Hiromi evaluated her own chakra level. She’d be fine for a while, and she had her reserve seal to help her out. She might need to force Kie to take one of those new soldier pills, however.

 

Matsuri took advantage of her opponent’s delayed reactions thanks to her poison and distraction thanks to Hiromi’s needles to stab him. In the background, the raiton user making Araya’s life very difficult suddenly took things up a notch, molding so much chakra at once that Hiromi’s eyes widened.

 

“Araya! Raiton user – _now!”_ she snapped, subconsciously imitating Tokara-taichou’s commanding bark.

 

Obediently, Araya pulled out yet another pre-tagged kunai ( _Did he spend all of his free time last week making those?)_ and lobbed it at the two remaining foes, fuse already burning down. Before it could touch ground, however, the Kumo raiton user completed his handseals and, with a roar of defiance, pressed his hands to the earth. Lightning chakra practically _gushed_ out of his system into the soil, spreading towards them in a subterranean surge.

 

It was a weaponized indirect lightning strike, Hiromi realized dully. She had read the statistics on those. Instinctively but likely futilely, her chakra coils produced a large batch of healing chakra and flooded her system with it, bracing her for impact.

 

The world went dark. 

 

* * *

 

Consciousness did not hurry to resume its normal functioning. It stuttered and jumped around like a sputtering seal tag for several moments, her senses equally fuzzy, before finally smoothing out into a full-body sensation of wretchedness. Her wildly spinning chakra sense slowly settling, Hiromi took care not to move a muscle or alter her breathing and took stock.

 

All limbs still attached and apparently functional. Good. Internal organs a bit stressed but serviceable. Minor electrical burns, already on the mend. Physical system still flooded with healing chakra, probably the only reason she was still breathing. Chakra system a little unhappy but intact. Reserve seal still untouched. Might have to start tapping into that soon, though.

 

All in all, _much_ better than she had anticipated. Despite her last-ditch effort, she hadn’t really anticipated waking at all. What were a cracked rib or two and assorted other small injuries compared to death?

 

With that in mind, Hiromi extended her wobbly chakra sense to check on her teammates. Her position facedown in the dirt meant she didn’t need to shift a muscle to focus. Rapidly cooling Uzumaki signature several feet northwest, to her left. He had taken the brunt of the lightning strike. ( _Araya. No. Araya. You – hang on! Please!)_ A smudge of earth, cold and crumbled, behind her, a few feet southwest. ( _You did your best, Kie_. _Rest easy.)_ Beside her, almost within reach, a struggling Uzumaki signature that smelt of solvents and smoke. ( _No, no, Matsuri! Hang on, Matsuri!)_ Wounded or cooling signatures, primarily Uzumaki, kilometers to the northeast. As she concentrated, they blinked out, one by one. Signatures that tasted primarily of lightning danced around them.

 

Another squad of chakra signatures was approaching her position. Their footsteps were soundless, but their voices carried, speaking in their own, harsher language. The Kumo nin were more confident now, it seemed.

 

 _Good_ , Hiromi thought. _I can use that._

 

“…make sure they’re all dead,” a Kumo nin, presumably the captain, ordered, as his subordinates fanned out. “That ice bitch took down two whole squads by herself before we gutted her. I don’t want a repeat.”

 

“Dead,” a woman reported tonelessly, standing near what was left of Kie.

 

A man snorted. “You think?”

 

“Forget him. Check the Uzumaki,” the captain snapped. “They’re like damn cockroaches.”

 

The second man stooped, and the last glimmer of Araya’s chakra vanished. “He’s dead now,” the Kumo nin reported. “ _Damn_ , I think he was still breathing a little.”

 

Hiromi bit back a whimper.

 

The fourth member of the squad was standing over her. If she wanted, she could have twisted her hand and grabbed him by the ankle. Instead, she carefully monitored her breathing and heartrate, mimicking unconsciousness.

 

“This one’s still alive,” the man next to her reported. “Her chakra’s still twitching. Medic, by the looks of the gear. White hair.”

 

“Shimizu, then.” The Kumo captain made a thoughtful noise. “Could be useful.”

 

“Should we bring her in, then? We always need medics.”

 

“And the Shimizu have that kekkei genkai that produces good medics,” the captain added, apparently thinking out loud. “Plus, it’s rumored they have dirt on how every other kekkei genkai in the Land of Fire works.”

 

The woman shifted uncomfortably. “Albinos are _bad luck_ ,” she hissed. “Remember the Kinkaku Squad?”

 

Ignoring her, the captain snapped, “Grab her, Daiki. Dispose of the other Uzumaki. The rest of you, fall back. This should be the last of the Uzu rats.”

 

This was the moment Hiromi had been waiting for. As the man standing next to her bent down – to grab her or to ensure she was properly unconscious and _then_ grab her, one of the two -, she pushed herself up with one hand and lashed out with the other. Chakra buzzed sharp and blue on her fingertips. His throat slit without a drop of blood spilt, the man collapsed where she had lain only a second previously.

 

Hiromi was already up and on her feet, viciously spitting senbon of water at the man who had finished off Araya. Unfortunately for him, he turned just in time to receive those water needles in the throat and eyes. As he collapsed with a gurgle, lightning chakra began to whine behind her. Time to increase her speed. Spinning, Hiromi nudged at her reserve seal, allowing her stored chakra to trickle into her system.

 

“I told you! _I told you!”_ the woman was shrieking.

 

With a curse, the Kumo squad captain tossed a bolt of lightning at Hiromi. She ducked, chakra scalpels still humming on her hands. She might not have high weapons proficiency or many suiton jutsu under her belt, but she was a medic. She was a Shimizu. She knew how to dodge.

 

The skin on her face tingling as the flowing lines of her reserve seal spread under her happuri and visor, Hiromi shot forward at near-shunshin speeds. Lightning bolts uselessly hit the ground in her wake. Closing in on the Kumo squad captain in the blink of an eye, she slashed at his upper arm. Overcharged now thanks to the extra chakra flowing from her reserve seal, her scalpels visibly cut through skin, muscle and bone, slicing his arm clean off. A split second later, she repeated with her other hand the throat slash she’d used on the first man. This time, it was messier. Hiromi twisted to avoid the blood.

 

The final and female member of the Kumo squad had stopped shrieking imprecations long enough to flip through handseals and breathe out a gout of fire. Hiromi swerved. Her chakra sense told her that the Kumo nin was active, taking advantage of the flames’ cover, but it apparently involved no ninjutsu – Hiromi would definitely have sensed any further chakra molding. When the flames dissipated, however, Hiromi was forced to weave away again by another ball of fire.

 

 _Ridiculous. What are you, an Uchiha?_ Hiromi wanted to retort.

 

She very much wanted to end this as quickly as possible, but the Kumo kunoichi clearly had other ideas. Having learned from the fates of her squad members, she kept Hiromi at a distance with flames and projectiles. She even threw out caltrops. Hiromi was just getting the feeling that she was being herded somewhere when a line of chakra flaring in her senses alerted her.

 

Ninja wire. The woman had tied wire to her projectiles. With as fond as she seemed of fire, it might even be the type of wire that conducted chakra and burned like a fuse.

 

As wires came to life around Hiromi and whirled like snakes to bring her to her fiery doom, she hurriedly brought her hands together in a seal and rushed forward. A wave of water burst from her lips, smothering the latest fireball and staggering the Kumo nin. The wires closed in knots around empty air behind her. Her fingers working to twist the wire around for a second try, the enemy kunoichi ducked Hiromi’s first lunge with chakra scalpels. The second ripped open her lovely white flak jacket and the flesh beneath it.

 

Wires wrapped themselves around Hiromi’s feet, tugging her off-balance, but she followed through, breaking the Kumo nin’s guard with one hand and dragging the other scalpel across her throat.

 

 _Messy_.

 

All enemy chakra signatures in the immediate vicinity dead or dying, Hiromi let the scalpels fade and disentangled herself so she could rush to Matsuri’s side. Experience let her bite back a wince. Alive, alive – Matsuri _lived_. She could work with that.

 

Jumping up, she rushed over to Araya. His skin was warm, when she slipped her fingers down his neck in search of a pulse. She found none. No. No, that couldn’t be right. She _knew_ Araya’s heartbeat, his warmth, his… ( _no, no, don’t think about it, don’t_ think _about it, it’s bad luck)_. Surely she was mistaken. She had to be mistaken.

 

A flicker of his chakra, golden as the sun, registered to her sense and was gone.

 

“No. No. Araya. No.” Hiromi realized her voice was breaking and swallowed down a sob. She wanted nothing more than to pour every drop of chakra she possessed into him, to coax his soul back into its home by jutsu or seal, whatever it took; she wanted to never move again. But she could do none of that. She had to carry on. And Matsuri - !

 

Somehow, Hiromi staggered to her feet and back to Matsuri. She had healed her friend on so many missions before harmonizing her healing chakra to the frequency of Matsuri’s took less than a thought. Leaving the electrical burns alone for the moment, she did her best to stabilize Matsuri’s jumpy circulatory system while soothing her frazzled nervous system and checking for other damage. She had lost quite a bit of blood, too; if Hiromi could stop the bleeding and stitch up the slashes from her kenjutsu struggle, she carried blood-replenishing pills that could help with that issue.

 

Enemy signatures flitted about in the distance, but Hiromi ignored them. They weren’t close enough yet. They weren’t an immediate threat. Matsuri was here. Matsuri was her focus.

 

“Come on, Matsuri. You’re an Uzumaki. Are you going to let a little lightning keep you down?” Hiromi asked under her breath. Tears pricked her eyes and she firmly squashed the impulse to give in to her emotions. Not now.

 

Finally, Matsuri’s heartrate evened out and beat steadily once more. Hiromi turned her attention to Matsuri’s more visible wounds, releasing a little more chakra from her reserve seal and sending it to her friend’s aid. Blood coagulated, cells divided, and slowly torn and missing tissue regrew. Fishing out a blood-replenishing pill, Hiromi carefully forced it down Matsuri’s throat.

 

Matsuri limped back into the waking world as Hiromi was hurriedly bandaging the electrical burns, not willing to waste any more time when at any moment a Kumo squad could decide to investigate in their direction.

 

“…H-Hiromi?” she whispered. Hiromi hated how weak her friend’s voice sounded.

 

“Almost done here.”

 

“…Others?”

 

Hiromi sat on her eyes’ traitorous impulse to tear up once more. She merely shook her head, securing the last bit of gauze and sitting back on her heels. “We need to move.” She couldn’t look at Matsuri just yet. It didn’t matter if Matsuri knew or not. She just couldn’t.

 

Calling on that famous – or infamous – Uzumaki vitality, Matsuri forced herself up on her elbows, taking in the carnage around her. Jaw set, she scanned the horizon. “Hiromi, you don’t have time for me. You need to get home and warn them.”

 

“No. Not without you.” Hiromi slipped an arm around Matsuri’s shoulders and helped her to her feet. “No one gets left behind.” Once Matsuri could stand on her own, she pulled out two black-edged scrolls and headed for the bodies of her two dead teammates. “No one,” she repeated.

 

“Hiromi… you’ve already tapped your reserve seal,” Matsuri remonstrated in a low voice. “You can’t carry us both.”

 

“I can try,” Hiromi said in a fierce whisper as she sealed Araya’s body into one of the two scrolls. If her visor was not inscribed with tiny seals along the edges to keep it clear as well as filter incoming light, she was sure it would be fogging up from the tears that just would not go away.

 

“You’ll get us both killed.”

 

“We’re less than a day from the border of Fire. Surely we can make that.”

 

“As many times as we’ve been ambushed…?” Matsuri winced. “Hey… is Konoha closer right now than home?”

 

“Probably.” Hiromi gathered the various pieces of Kie’s body and sealed them into the other scroll. The enemy chakra signatures hovering at the edges of her sensing range were growing closer. They needed to move out, stat.

 

Konoha was an ally. Konoha maintained outposts and border patrols at the edge of the Fire Daimyo’s territory. Konoha would give aid. Konoha would respond to an attack on Uzushio.

 

Konoha meant her godfather and Mito-oba-san.

 

Without giving Matsuri more time to argue, Hiromi grabbed her and took off southwest, distant Kumo squads now in pursuit.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thus begins the Second Shinobi World War, with Kumo ambushing Uzushio envoys and then teaming up with Kiri to wipe out the Uzumaki. I’m sure someone somewhere is whining that I didn’t include Iwa in the force attacking Uzushio last chapter. I simply decided Uzushio had to have been taken out by surprise in a short, brutal battle and two nations would work better for that than three. Iwa was simply the least geographically plausible nation to attack Uzushio. Imagine instead that Iwa and the other half of Kumo’s forces held off Konoha in one of the first open battles of the war while Uzushio was ransacked. (Plus, it says something chilling about the balance of power in the Elemental Nations that three nations could so casually gang up on Uzushio and wipe it out without Konoha able to do anything about it. Like, what’s stopping them from doing that to Konoha?)
> 
> This is probably also a good time to mention that POV characters may swerve into Unreliable Narrator territory occasionally, especially in their opinions of themselves and their abilities and of other people. Sumiko, for instance, carried quite a bit of self-loathing. Hiromi is so used to being no more than a medic and being surrounded by competent Uzumaki that she doesn’t realize just how much potential she has (or had).
> 
> Also, I’m not a doctor, so if Hiromi or any other medically-inclined character gets up to any seriously wrong shenanigans, it’s my fault. I try to do some research, but it’s not the same thing. Dang it, Jim, I’m a chemist, not a trauma surgeon! Those of you in the know about these things, feel free to chip in! 
> 
> I’ve also headcanoned that Kumo speaks English. It just makes sense, what with names like ‘A’ and ‘Killer B’, etc. Besides, one language for various cultures spread across an entire continent for 800+ years? Yeah, no. You could argue that everyone in Naruto is speaking a lingua franca, but still. Why does Hiromi speak Kumo's language? Her mother and her Akemi-oba-san thought it would be good for her to learn the main languages of the Elemental Nations – particularly those hostile to Konoha and Uzushio. Akemi and Sumiko themselves both received training as diplomats. Uzushio didn’t maintain its neutrality for so long by only blowing up all those who opposed them.
> 
> Spinner, signing out.
> 
> Dead: Fuyuchi Kanna, Kie, Sagiri, Uzumaki Araya, Uzumaki Keisuke, Uzumaki Shira, Uzumaki Tokara
> 
> Relevant Character Death Toll: 14


	3. At Bay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned _Naruto_ , I’d explain the chakra system in more detail, because even the little bit we hear of it sounds really fascinating. Gates and tenketsu? Tell me more. Are there chakra system disorders? What’s the story behind Rock Lee’s problem? Are there others like him? I want to know!
> 
> Edited: 9/3/18.

Disclaimer: If I owned _Naruto_ , I’d explain the chakra system in more detail, because even the little bit we hear of it sounds really fascinating. Gates and tenketsu? Tell me more. Are there chakra system disorders? What’s the story behind Rock Lee’s problem? Are there others like him? I want to know!

 

 

More Kumo nin. Always more. They swarmed after her. Their chakra signatures peppered the edges of her senses like a horde of locusts.

 

The Raikage must have churned out every shinobi he could field in his bid to destroy Uzushio before the Uzumaki and their allies could know what hit them. Surely, no expense had been spared to hunt down the last two survivors of the initial ambush. What seemed an entire division of Kumo nin chased after Hiromi and Matsuri. Some of the squads, perhaps equipped with good sensors or trackers, followed their trail fairly accurately, while others moved in standard search patterns. They crisscrossed the countryside of the Land of Hot Water, cutting the two daughters of Uzushio off from the quickest route to Konoha.

 

Hiromi grudged them for every step they were driven out of their way.

 

She dared not stop for any length of time, not any longer than it took to catch her breath and choke down a little water and a rations bar. Not with her _failures_ compounding. Not with Matsuri injured. Not with the news of an invasion by Kumo burning in her heart. Not with the last chakra impressions she’d had of those who stayed behind to buy time flickering in her memory like a bad dream. Not with the two black-edged scrolls tucked into her holsters, impossibly heavy for some bits of paper and ink. Not with her home on the line.

 

She’d lost time, backing up and skirting west and running in large loops to avoid Kumo squads or to muddy her trail. Somewhere over the horizon, the border of the Land of Fire hovered tantalizingly, still just under a solid day’s run away.

 

Hiromi gritted her teeth. They’d make it somehow. Matsuri was injured, but she was an Uzumaki; she’d drag herself along by sheer willpower if she had to. And Hiromi was the medic; if Matsuri could make it, Hiromi would make it, too. She had to. She was sworn not to give up on her teammates until they no longer had need of healing…

 

It came to Hiromi then that two interpretations of that regulation existed, and she shied away from that thought.

 

_Not Matsuri. Please, just let me keep Matsuri alive._

 

She had shut off the flow of chakra from her reserve seal after healing Matsuri as much as had been feasible, but enough had remained in her system to carry her on her way for dozens of kilometers. Her chakra reserves weren’t scraped dry just yet, and she had spent the last few months investing a great deal of chakra in her reserve seal, on Akemi-oba-san’s advice. If she _had_ to fight her way past a squad or two, she should have enough to carry herself and Matsuri through.

 

Matsuri was not the lightest burden, no matter how much the Uzumaki tried to help her, but Hiromi did not mind. Matsuri was a good friend, maybe even her best friend, and Hiromi was spurred on by memories of hours spent doodling together, of testing homemade explosive tags in the backyard (perhaps she took after her okaa-san more than she thought), of pranking with Matsuri’s least harmful poisons boys who teased them and clan members who looked down on Hiromi for her illegitimacy, of Matsuri cheerfully offering herself up as a victim – _ahem_ , practice subject – when Hiromi was learning medical ninjutsu, of missions run together.

 

Matsuri was as good as a sister.

 

When the chakra she had pulled from her reserve seal was used up, Hiromi halted briefly again. She had chosen a secluded location deep in a wooded area, far from any hamlet or larger settlement so that any confrontation with Kumo nin, if and when they were caught, would not put civilians in the crossfire. Leaning against a stray tree, she slowly regulated her breathing until it came back to normal and drank some water in small sips.

 

She had let Matsuri down when she stopped, and the Uzumaki was currently checking her bandages and stretching. Her jaw set when Hiromi glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. “I’m running now,” she said quietly. “You can’t carry me forever, not if we’re going to make it to Fire.”

 

“Matsuri…”

 

“You said it yourself, Hiromi,” Matsuri cut in, not giving Hiromi any time to voice further concerns. “I’m an Uzumaki. I can handle this.”

 

Hiromi screwed the cap back on her waterskin and returned it to one of the myriads of storage seals on her wrists. The seal flared, black chakra ink appearing in elegant circles and spirals on her pale skin when activated before vanishing from sight once again. “Heh.” She shook her head. “This is the part where my okaa-san would be cursing your Uzumaki vitality.”

 

Matsuri rolled her eyes, but the gesture was almost fond. “She should know, with friends like Satomi-san and Mito-sama and Shinju-sama. I’m still impressed she can keep up with them as well as she does. She makes it look easy. Same for you, Hiromi. Sometimes, I swear it _is_ easy for you. You sure you’re not part-Uzumaki?”

 

If anyone else had said that, Hiromi would have taken offense at the allegation. Instead, she only reached up and tapped the bun on the back of her head, careful not to disturb the seal-inscribed sharpened sticks holding her hair in place. “Does this look red to you?” she asked, continuing their old joke.

 

Matsuri grinned tiredly. “No. Shame. It’d go with the theme. Red eyes, red markings, red seal… might as well add red hair to the mix.”

 

Hiromi made a small noise of amusement, assessing her chakra system. She should be good for a few more hours’ running, but then she’d probably have to choke down a chakra pill to keep going. She hated those things, and she had long been secretly grateful to her un-Shimizu-like sturdy constitution and large chakra reserves for keeping her from using them often.

 

With no more words, she and Matsuri took off again. Matsuri put forth a valiant effort to keep up, but she could not travel at her full speed. That Kumo nin’s indirect lightning strike jutsu had been so strong, as if he had expected it to be a suicide attack and had thrown every last bit of his life’s strength into it. Araya had taken the brunt of it, but…

 

( _No. Araya. No. Don’t… Don’t think about it.)_

 

The thought of that Kumo nin still nagged at Hiromi. _Is Uzushio truly so feared, that shinobi of other nations will so willingly throw away their lives for the chance to wipe us out?_ She suppressed an involuntary shiver.

 

If that suspicion were true, it made the necessity of reaching and warning Konoha all the greater.

 

As they swerved through the countryside of Hot Water, with half a dozen Kumo squads on their tail, rage and desperation built within Hiromi at each delay. She tried to shove it down, to bury it beneath the habits of polite calm and kindness and dutifulness she had so carefully cultivated. She could not afford to let emotion cloud her thinking, not when so much lay on the line. Not with her responsibility to keep Matsuri alive. Not with her duty to bring warning to her home and Konoha.

 

A glance to Matsuri as she signed an update on their pursuers’ positions relative to themselves, and the anger lurking beneath her skin received a little more fuel. She knew all too well that set to Matsuri’s jaw, the one that said she’d rather bite off her own tongue than complain.

 

Her pace had yet not faltered from the steady clip Hiromi had set, however. Without a word, she followed Hiromi’s lead through thicket and over the occasional river, and once along the sheer side of a cliff before leaping the ravine and continuing on. Hiromi pushed aside a wish that she had had a greater familiarity with the terrain of Hot Water. No use wishing about it now.

 

Not once had any of the pursuing Kumo squads entered visual range since Hiromi grabbed Matsuri and sped away from the scene of their last encounter, but they were closing in. It was growing harder and harder to escape the net the squads wove around them, and Hiromi found herself studying the landscape flashing past them more closely, on the lookout for any patch of terrain that would suit a battle.

 

Hiromi had no intention of being drawn into a purely defensive battle. It would waste far too much time and the risks of both Hiromi and Matsuri dying with no one left to bring word to Konoha were too great. However, if they needed to strike down a squad or two in order to punch their way out of Kumo’s net and reach the Land of Fire, Hiromi would much prefer to pick the timing and situation.

 

Flashing a hand signal to Matsuri, who fell out of her run and dropped into a watchful position, Hiromi crouched and touched the earth. Her eyes closed in concentration as her chakra sense spread across the landscape, picking up the echoes of natural energy and forming a mental picture.

 

As always, the natural energy whispered seductively to her, twining about her chakra like vines snaking up a wall. Hiromi had never reached for it directly, however. Anyone as experienced as she in chakra theory had heard the horror stories of those who unwisely fooled around with natural energy. Petrification in the shape of various animals was the most common result, as well as one of the kindest. Hiromi had not slept well after reading that one account of a would-be sage who muddled his rituals and opened himself to youkai instead.

 

She had never wanted to question too closely _why_ natural energy seemed so friendly to her. It couldn’t mean anything good.

 

Straightening, Hiromi flashed some hand signs to Matsuri, long habit helping her bite back the curse words another shinobi would have wanted to spew. The tracker squads hurrying on their heels were annoyance enough, but one of the other squads flanking them had pulled in. If she and Matsuri weren’t careful, they’d be pinned between the two Kumo squads. One they might be able to fight past, but two?

 

 _Better not risk it_.

 

Hiromi and Matsuri shot off once more, this time clinging close to a mountain stream pouring out of one of Hot Water’s many craggy valleys. Running across the surface of the water left fewer traces for them to be followed by non-chakra-sensor trackers, and Hiromi could not deny the slight boost to confidence that having a reliable source of water nearby gave her. Sure, she was a Shimizu who had awakened her kekkei genkai and could condense water out of her chakra with barely a thought, but having a stream at hand would make any suiton ninjutsu even easier, for her and Matsuri both.

 

All too soon, the Kumo squad that had pulled back in and which they had hoped to run right past was on them, and Hiromi and Matsuri readied themselves.

 

Taking to the shore temporarily to circumvent a waterfall, they hopped down a series of spray-slick rocks to the lower pool, water roaring in their ears. With the waterfall’s drop and the tumbled ground on either side of the rushing water behind them, the enemy nin would be unable to easily flank them or get behind them. A hurried trade with Hiromi gave Matsuri the remainder of Araya’s tagged kunai, which Hiromi had scavenged when she retrieved his body. Matsuri tossed one of the kunai with explosion tags tied to them to each bank of the waterfall’s pool but did not set them off, and Hiromi laid down a False Surroundings genjutsu to hide them just as the Kumo nin came in range.

 

Once again, the Kumo nin did not bother with words. All business, they did not even issue taunts or threats. With wary determination, they slowly approached, obviously expecting a trap and scanning the ground for hidden dangers. Their desire to leave no openings for the Uzushio nin to escape helpfully divided them, with two approaching on each side of the stream.

 

One arm around Hiromi’s shoulders, Matsuri leaned heavily against the medic, her other hand behind her back, fingers already locked into the half-seal to detonate the tags. Hiromi steadied Matsuri with one hand, a smoke pellet and one of Matsuri’s poison sachets between the fingers of the other.

 

While the other two merely stood waiting and ready, a Kumo nin on the left side of the stream opened with a volley of shuriken as the woman beside him wove handseals. Sensing the lightning chakra she was kneading in her coils, Hiromi toggled the valve of her reserve seal, warm chakra rushing into her strained body as the elegant lines of chakra ink trickled down her face once again.

 

As the kunoichi finished the seal sequence and lightning surged around her hands, Matsuri triggered the explosion tags. At the same moment, Hiromi shunshined forward, angling herself to pass right by the two Kumo nin on the left side and dropping the smoke pellet mid-route. The stream lit up with electric chakra behind her in her sixth sense, a fitting backdrop as the two explosion tags detonated.

 

_Two down. Thanks, Araya._

 

The man who had thrown the shuriken had obviously not expected them to rush right towards him, and the woman had bent to infuse her lightning chakra into the water in an attempt to kill Hiromi and Matsuri from a distance. Neither had been in a position to easily dodge the blast. Both lay dead now, bodies mangled and chakra signatures fading rapidly.

 

The other two Kumo nin, more alert, had leapt clear of the explosion meant for them. With the dead woman’s chakra draining from the water, they stormed across the stream in angry pursuit. Hiromi lobbed the poison sachet at them over her shoulder, forcing them to swerve. It distracted them, but not so much that one of them did not think to flare his chakra in a pattern obviously meant to alert the other Kumo squads.

 

Despite herself, Hiromi thought a very bad word.

 

Matsuri must have felt the chakra flare as well. Another of Araya’s explosion-tagged kunai in hand, she slid her arm off Hiromi’s shoulders. Her grim expression conveyed her thoughts as well as words could have. They shot off, pushing their speeds as high as they could and dared, given the broken terrain and the pursuit - Hiromi riding on the chakra boost her second tap of her reserve seal had given her, Matsuri dredging up more chakra from her seemingly-endless well.

 

The two survivors of the Kumo squad who had located them remained in hot pursuit, always in visual range far behind them, but they made no herculean effort to pull even with them. The suddenly increased pace of the sensor or tracker squad Hiromi had worried would hit them in the back earlier explained that decision. Kumo preferred to outnumber them three-to-one in their next attack.

 

Hiromi’s lips drew apart in a soundless snarl. Samurai-like notions of honor held no place on a battlefield of shinobi, but offense piled on offense could rile even Hiromi’s buried temper. Kumo had broken faith, shattered the peace, and ambushed messengers in territory allied with Konoha and Uzushio. The excessive force dispatched to ensure no survivors of that ambush remained? On the one hand, it spoke highly of how feared were the skills of the Uzumaki. On the other hand, it fostered helpless rage and frustration in Hiromi’s heart.

 

_Is this what you felt, otou-san, before you died?_

 

A few kilometers, and the tracker squad met up with the closest two Kumo pursuers. All six shot after them, five lightning chakra signatures and one fire glimmering in Hiromi’s chakra sense like angry spirits. If Hiromi had dared to risk a peek over her shoulder while running, she could have seen all of them in their bright white flak jackets, leaping through trees and down slopes.

 

At little more than a twitch and a nod from Matsuri, Hiromi veered back towards the stream they had been running across only half an hour earlier. A rush from the Kumo nin tried to cut them off, but their desperate bid paid off and they reached the water once more.

 

Tagged kunai clenched in her teeth, Matsuri was already forming handseals as she slid to a halt on the fast-flowing surface and spun around, breathing out a large purple cloud. The Kumo nin scattered as best they could, one unable to stop in time and plunging right into the poisonous fume. At Matsuri’s side, Hiromi flashed through the seals for her standby, _Suiton: Tenkyuu_. The first Kumo nin to race around the poison cloud and draw back his arm to hurl shuriken received a faceful of water senbon for his troubles.

 

A second volley persuaded the second man to appear to also fall back, giving Hiromi enough time to gather chakra and sink it into the water beneath her feet. She ducked the retaliatory shuriken as she wove handseals with desperate speed, fingers locked in Tiger as the chakra-infused water below her spun tighter and tighter. Behind her, a thunderous _boom_ rocked the water as Araya’s explosion tag went off, the coughs of Matsuri spewing more poison clouds lost in the reverberations.

 

Chakra sense warning her to twist aside in time to avoid a spear of lightning, Hiromi called, “ _Suiton: Suigadan!”_ Large, twisting fangs of water erupted from the stream around her, spiraling towards her attackers. Most of them hopped back to the shore and fell back out of range, but one, perhaps a chuunin by his chakra reserves, didn’t move quickly enough. The water fangs tore into him, grinding away at his flesh and bones until his body had been torn to meaty rags.

 

Not wasting a moment to watch the messiness of his fate, Hiromi spun around and wordlessly traded positions with Matsuri, who gripped her tantou in one hand and yet another of Araya’s many tagged kunai in her other. The small splash of lightning that burst from the kunai as it landed on the bank behind Hiromi capitalized on any lingering dampness the Kumo shinobi might have suffered as a result of Hiromi’s jutsu. One nin went down, at least temporarily incapacitated as his nervous system convulsed.

 

Meanwhile, hands still clasped in Tiger, Hiromi endeavored with her still-spinning water fangs to make approaching her as difficult as possible for the two Kumo nin who had avoided the poison cloud on Matsuri’s end. The sixth member of the squad still crouched in the cloud, probably hacking his shredded lungs up; it spoke very poorly of the Kumo nin’s teamwork that they had left him there to suffer his fate. Hiromi dodged another spear of lightning and noted that, behind her, Matsuri had moved to close-range.

 

_Be careful, Matsuri!_

 

Then suddenly a Kumo jounin was close, too close, and Hiromi dropped the water fangs to spit a few sealless but weak water senbon at his throat. His lightning-wreathed fist swung over her head. Coming up from her dip, Hiromi lashed out, medical chakra at the tips of her fingers jabbing into his thigh, his hip, his thoracic diaphragm, paralyzing the muscles. He choked, flailing. Hiromi then threw herself right to avoid kunai glinting with lightning chakra.

 

_Another squad approaching from the northwest, too soon… too many…_

As he lost concentration and sank into the water, the slowly asphyxiating man behind her tried to save himself by flushing his system with chakra. It flashed and flared weakly behind her like a dying star. No good; Hiromi had shredded the chakra vessels in those muscles. She put him out of her mind as her female opponent flung another kunai and backflipped twice to give herself space, clearly having taken her comrade’s imminent death to heart.

_No, no, Matsuri! Hang on!_

 

“Switch!” yelled Hiromi, forgetting subtlety as she wheeled around and granted the Kumo kunoichi the space she wanted. The sixth member of the squad had dragged himself out of the poison cloud, the approaching squad was coming in hot, and Matsuri could barely fend off her two attackers with a tantou and the last of Araya’s kunai. One man still twitched randomly from the electric blast of the earlier kunai, but he divided Matsuri’s attention and had nicked her in several places with shuriken. The other was doing his best with a wakizashi to maneuver Matsuri in for the kill. She coughed up more poison in his face, but he could wave away most of the small purple puff with his hand.

 

Water senbon heralded Hiromi’s arrival as she charged in. The twitchy guy lunged to safety, but the kenjutsu user was forced to evade a swipe of Matsuri’s tantou just in time for Hiromi’s needles to nail him in the right shoulder. With a curse, he snatched his wakizashi with his left hand and opened up a deep cut on Matsuri’s thigh. As she stumbled back, he was forced to block as Hiromi kicked out at him.

 

The chakra-enhanced blow still staggered him, surprising him long enough for Hiromi to push off the water’s surface with her hands. Chakra scalpels flared into life around her fingers as she righted herself, one burying itself into his injured shoulder. A shuriken sliced her cheek and another bounced off her flak jacket, but Hiromi ignored them in favor of ripping off his arm and deflecting the hand with the wakizashi when he swung at her again. His agonized howl was short-lived, subsiding into a wet gurgle as she passed a glowing hand through his throat.

 

_Matsuri – Matsuri, what are you doing – that’s a lot of chakra that woman’s kneading…_

 

Slinging blood off with a jerk of her hand, both scalpels still humming and the burgundy curlicues of her reserve seal spreading over her face once more, Hiromi spun towards the shuriken-tossing twitchy guy. His hands were frozen halfway through some seal sequence, the whites of his eyes clearly visible as he gaped at her in horror.

 

_You’re wasting my time – wasting my time… Matsuri!_

 

“B-bad luck,” he stammered, staring at her in a new, terrified light, as if some denizen out of his nightmares had suddenly strolled into broad daylight in front of him. He couldn’t be more than a chuunin, to be so cowed by a little killing intent. Hmm, there _was_ a lot of it in the air, wasn’t there?

  
Oh, wait, that was her.

 

Lightning chakra _screamed_ behind her ( _Matsuri! No, kami-sama, not Matsuri!)_ and Hiromi shot forward, giving the unfortunate chuunin a swift solution to his terror. As he slumped with a torn throat in the shallows of the stream, the current already tugging at his limbs, Hiromi flashed towards the still-coughing sixth member of the squad. Eyes wide, he hurriedly dropped whatever jutsu he’d been scrambling together and threw up a chakra-infused sword to defend himself.

 

_Aim at Matsuri, would you?!_

 

Hiromi’s foot smashed into his forearm, bones snapping beneath her sandal. Only a pained hiss escaping his clenched teeth, he tried to retaliate, but Hiromi was running on her stored chakra now, shunshin-fast, thunder in her wake. His movements seemed pitiably slow. A chakra scalpel carved his neck open from his ear to his collar bone, and then Hiromi dropped him, racing back across the water for Matsuri.

 

_Oncoming squad almost in visual now… another behind them…_

Hiromi had turned just in time to see Matsuri bury her tantou in the kunoichi’s chest, flak jacket and all. Not bothering to retrieve it, she collapsed to her hands and knees on the stream’s surface, every limb trembling with exhaustion and the after-effects of electrocution. Blood sheeted down one leg from the cut she’d received a minute earlier, and her already fair skin looked as pale as Hiromi’s own albino complexion.

 

“Matsuri!” Hiromi dropped to her knees beside her, hands glowing with the Mystical Palm Technique as she knitted together muscle and skin with desperate fervor. Matsuri muttered something, but Hiromi paid her no attention until the bleeding had halted and she had fished out another blood-replenishing pill. Matsuri waved it away.

 

“A-another squad… coming?” she gasped out.

 

Hiromi nodded. “Almost in visual. We’ve got to run.”

 

Matsuri tried to crack a grin – unsuccessfully, but the effort was made. “No more… no m-more running for me.”

 

“Matsuri…?”

 

With an effort, Matsuri pushed herself to her feet. “I’m an… Uzumaki. Can c-cause ‘nough d-damage. Go… Hiromi. K-Konoha.”

 

“Not without you! I’m a medic! I can’t leave my squad!”

 

“This m-more ‘portant… th-than squad or orders,” Matsuri argued. She shoved lightly at Hiromi’s shoulder. Hiromi didn’t budge. “Go!”

 

Yet four more Kumo nin from the Raikage’s apparently infinite supply bounded into view, following the stream’s path. Their enraged yells at the carnage of their comrades preceded a hail of projectiles forcing Matsuri and Hiromi to jump apart – Matsuri not as far. Face screwed up with fierce determination, she breathed out the largest cloud of poison Hiromi had ever seen her produce, entirely replacing her earlier efforts. The thick darkness of the cloud, not the usual medium purple Hiromi was accustomed to seeing, indicated she had altered its chemical composition.

 

Then Matsuri held up a hand, and with an E-rank katon a small flame sprang to life on her fingertip.

 

_BOOM!_

 

Hiromi let herself drop into the stream to avoid the blast, the explosion’s noise and concussive force abated by the water. Kicking against the swift current, she pulled herself back to the surface as soon as the flames dwindled out and rushed towards Matsuri’s weak chakra. As she watched, a shaking Matsuri locked her hands in the Bird seal and summoned a vortex of water around herself, rotating swiftly enough to fling back two of the charred nin who flung themselves at her.

 

After a few moments, the vortex splashed back into the stream, and a Kumo jounin covered in burns leapt towards her, his extended blade crackling with lightning.

 

_MATSURI!_

 

All the frustration and rage that had mounted within Hiromi as the Kumo nin cut down her comrades one by one and harried them all through the valleys of Hot Water reached a breaking point. Abandoning all the precise techniques and caution she had been taught, Hiromi drew out what chakra remained in her reserve seal and reached out to the water. Even with Matsuri’s blood dissolving into it, it answered her call.

 

She was a Shimizu. All the water of the earth _was_ her blood.

 

_Come at me, you bastards!_

 

With only her mother’s overly-educational bedtime stories from years ago of one of the most boss suiton techniques ever performed to go on, Hiromi sank her chakra into the water in a circle around her. Staring the charred, suddenly wary Kumo nin dead in the eye, she clapped her hands together.

 

“ _SUITON: SUISHOUHA!”_

Her ring of chakra-infused water spun upwards into a much larger cylindrical vortex, the rush of thousands and thousands of liters of water a deafening roar. Like a dragon coiling protectively around her, the entirety of the stream lifted itself from its channel and twined about her. A great shockwave crested out of this vortex and arced down on the terrified Kumo nin, smashing them into the streambed and relentlessly battering them. Wave after wave of water slammed into them, clogging lungs, dislocating limbs, tossing helpless body after helpless body against rocks. Chakra signatures flashed in futile rage and despair in her sixth sense, railing against her angry sea. One blinked out, then another.

 

Palms still pressed together, Hiromi poured her pain into her shockwave, screaming until her throat burned in protest. A dry, angry heat throbbed within her, her chakra reserves scraped dry and her reserve seal emptied. The roaring of the vortex and crashing waves around her drowned out her own racing heartbeat, out-thundered her screaming and the gargled wails of the Kumo shinobi. Spray stung her face, drops of cool water burning her skin as if acidic. For one moment, she could almost believe in the water’s fury that the storm god had descended to the earth in vengeance and righteousness, aiding her by all means.

 

Her legs trembling, her ears ringing, Hiromi slowly let her hands drop. Around her, the vortex splashed back down to the streambed, her chakra ebbing from it as the water resumed its normal flow. Water dripped from a couple of trees unfortunate enough to grow close to the stream, their branches cracked and twisted into a gnarled mess. Half of the large rocks in the channel and lining the banks had been torn out of the earth and strewn about, some painted crimson. Littering the shallows and banks of the stream were the Kumo shinobi, in pieces of varying sizes. Scraps of torn clothing and other things bobbed past Hiromi’s feet, tugged along by the current.

 

Gasping for breath, Hiromi surveyed the wreckage with dead eyes. Her insides screeched at the chakra usage, but she let her system writhe in painful starvation for several long moments before robotically fetching a soldier pill from her medical pouches. She barely blinked at the bitter taste as she forced the lump down her throat.

 

Dead. They were all dead. She had made certain of that.

 

But Matsuri was dead as well. They had made certain of that. And not all the chakra in the world could mend that loss.

 

The sob emerged as a choking cough. Staggering as the soldier pill reached her stomach, digestive enzymes triggering its breakdown and the release of artificial chakra, Hiromi nearly stumbled. On tired feet, she turned and trudged down the stream, ignoring the scraps of Kumo nin as she searched for the tiny remaining smudge of Matsuri’s chakra.

 

She would not leave her friend’s body here, in this place. Matsuri would not rot in some unnamed mountain stream, exposed to wandering wolf or opportunistic bird. Matsuri would not share her resting place with her killers. Matsuri would be borne home with honor, even if it were the last thing Hiromi could give her.

 

Even as it was the last thing Hiromi could give Kie. Or Araya.

 

( _No. No. Don’t think about it._ )

 

After a minute or two of searching, Hiromi found Matsuri’s body pressed against a boulder in the middle of the stream, held there by the swift current. The rent in her flak jacket caused by that lightning-crackling sword did not look so bad. Her skin was so pale, though, too pale and cold, her limbs too slack.

 

Clenching her teeth together, Hiromi hefted Matsuri and brought her to the shore. A quick manipulation of the water soaking her clothes and gear flung it to the ground, leaving her dry and still, oh so still. Ignoring how her fingers shook, Hiromi retrieved what of Matsuri’s gear would be of use to her and slid another black-edged scroll from its holster. A few seconds later, and all that remained of her friend was a big black character on a previously empty scroll.

 

Hiromi pressed it to her forehead for one long moment. _Rest easy, Matsuri_ , she prayed. _Your sacrifice has been seen, and Uzushio shall not forget your name._ I _shall not forget your name, not as long as I live_.

 

Then she tucked the scroll away with the other two filled corpse scrolls. Finger to the earth, artificial chakra still pumping in her system, she scanned her surroundings. No Kumo squads near enough to bother her for a bit, although they’d come across the scattered remains of their fellows soon enough and redouble their efforts, enraged. The border of Fire still hovered over the horizon, several hours’ run away. She’d probably need to take another soldier pill if she planned to run the whole way at her top speed.

 

_So be it._

 

Burying her weariness and her jumbled emotions for later, if there proved to be a later, Hiromi shook herself and sped on her way.

 

Not an hour later, another Kumo squad attempted to bar her path, swords and raiton at the ready. Maybe something in her expression, in her chakra, in the aura of _I-would-kill-you-merely-for-inconveniencing-me-but-now-you’ve-_ hurt _-me_ surrounding her tipped them off. Suddenly wide eyes flashed to her white hair and to the stream rising in wrath behind her. Swords dropped from nerveless hands; raiton jutsu fizzled to sparks.

 

_“SUITON: SUISHOUHA!”_

 

She was a Shimizu. She was the river, she was the storm; the water itself served as her blood, and it whirled with her chakra as she flung the vortex of her pain at them, riding the thunderous waves as they crashed upon her foes once more. They fled before her, squealing, but too late, too late. The water dashed them to pieces upon the rocks and buried the remnants in the mud of the streambed, and Hiromi swept past them, no more thought spared for them but focused only on her goal.

 

Five more hours to Fire.

 

She swallowed another soldier pill, the taste not even registering, and kept running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn’t even intend to write this chapter. I became unexpectedly attached to Matsuri, accidentally saved her at the end of last chapter, and had to rectify that somehow. I listened to Florence + The Machine’s cover of “Stand By Me” on repeat to give myself the inspiration and nerve to kill her off. Whoops. Not that my treatment of Hiromi is much better, as you’ll see…
> 
> I know I killed off Kumo nin in this chapter and the last like mooks; might as well have given them face-obscuring helmets or something. However, most members of these tracker squads were probably chuunin and tokujou, with the elite jounin saved for the assault on Uzushio itself. (My timeline is a little confusing, because chapter 1 takes place a couple of days after chapters 2 and 3. Sorry.) Additionally, I wanted to showcase the strength and tough-as-nails vitality of the Uzumaki – and of their allies, to a degree – so that the fear other nations held of them would make more sense. 
> 
> Dead: Uzumaki Matsuri
> 
> Relevant Character Death Toll: 15


	4. Crash and Burn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned _Naruto_ , ninjas wouldn’t be able to run from one nation’s capital to another in a matter of a few days. Travel would actually take time.
> 
> Edited: 9/3/18.

Hiromi had thought the payoff worth it, taking that last soldier pill.

 

Sometime after she tore the second patrol apart with an A-Rank suiton ninjutsu she had never attempted before that day, she had abandoned all pretense of avoiding detection by Kumo. Instead, she had settled for crushing everyone in her path. The weight of her eight dead comrades – three corpse scrolls heavy on her heart – and the fear of Kumo’s army sweeping without warning down on her village pressed on her. Her teeth clenched, her lips in a straight line, she had discarded any further concern for her own fate. All that had mattered was warning Konoha so they could go to the aid of Uzushio, and, if it cost her life to bring that message to the Land of Fire, then so be it.

 

Only that iron-hard determination had carried her on, out of the wreckage of the shattered Kumo nin she left in her wake. Her weary limbs had screamed at her for rest; her lungs had burned for oxygen; her sight had blurred behind her visor. At times, as she struggled to keep her eyes open, she had navigated by chakra sense alone, kilometer after kilometer. Her chakra reserves and her reserve seal dry, she relied on soldier pills to fill her with enough of that bitter, artificial chakra to keep her going for another Kumo patrol and another few hours.

 

She knew the risks of taking multiple soldier pills, knew them very well. As the team medic, she’d reminded teammates of the risks all too often. Their unpleasant taste and the uncomfortably foreign sensation of the chakra they produced within her were not the only reasons she had always avoided taking them when she could. However, if they kept her alive and on her feet long enough to reach a Konoha outpost, it was worth it.

 

She could die honoring her comrades’ memory as long as word was brought to Konoha and help mustered for Uzushio.

 

Almost as soon as she took the second soldier pill, Hiromi had begun to feel the effects. Her chakra coils groaned as the stimulant goaded them into squeezing out more chakra; her chakra channels throughout the rest of her body uneasily constricted, not liking the impersonal feeling of the artificial chakra coursing through them. She had set her jaw and blocked out the warning signs, pushing on through the red blares of exhausted pain spreading through her system.

 

Black dots were swimming loop-de-loops in her vision when a small cluster of mostly fiery chakra signatures to the south moved into her sensing range. Tiny forks of lightning danced around them; wisps of chakra indicated an exchange of hostile jutsu. Steadying her limbs through a force of will, Hiromi swerved in that direction.

 

Perhaps she could assist the Konoha nin against their foes and deliver her news to them before dying.

 

She did not know whether this most recent Kumo squad had been ordered or not to pursue survivors of the original ambush of Uzushio’s shinobi. She did not know if they had been mobilized to neutralize Konoha outposts at the borders of the Land of Fire, to prevent word from spreading of Kumo’s surprise attack. Surely any sensor worth his salt stationed this close to the Land of Hot Water would have noticed the amounts of chakra being thrown around by now. Perhaps this Konoha squad had, in fact, realized something was amiss and crossed into allied territory to investigate, but had encountered an opportunistic Kumo squad.

 

Hiromi knew she stared the Shinigami in the face, but she would not go quietly. Not just yet.

 

_Don’t think about Matsuri. Don’t._

 

_And Araya –_

_No._

_Don’t._

 

Even if she converted a trickle of the chakra from the soldier pills to a healing frequency and diverted it to her limbs to ease the cramping, Hiromi could not push herself to any greater speed. Anxiously, she monitored the chakra signatures in the distance as thickets and hamlets flew past her. A fire-tinged signature blinked out.

 

Hiromi didn’t flinch. Only the line of her mouth flattened further.

_Not fast enough to save this ally, not fast enough to save Matsuri, not able to save Araya._

 

Another fiery signature was snuffed out, a lightning signature grounding itself in the dust beside it. A mutual kill. A flash of flame – a fireball blossomed in the trees just two ridges over. Her senses trained so acutely on the small battle into which she was running headlong, Hiromi could almost taste the chakra heat of the flames, the sharp ozone tang still lingering in the air from the preceding lightning.

 

One Konoha man stood alone against three remaining Kumo shinobi, the earthy Yang steadiness of his chakra in constant motion as he defended. Eyes like pale beacons, even to the sixth sense. A pinprick of green chakra, pulsing with pride and superiority and _pain_ , corralled with neat lines into a seal like a crown of thorns. Hyuuga. Byakugan. Branch Member.

 

Well, it couldn’t be helped. Hiromi did not pause. Maybe he wouldn’t hold a blood feud declared centuries ago against her.

 

Glimpsing her oncoming rush, one Kumo shinobi pulled back and called a warning to her teammates. They redoubled their efforts to bring down the last Konoha survivor, as Hiromi practically flew through bush and fern, dredging up the last bits of chakra that digested soldier pill could give her. Two kunai with explosion tags, already primed, soared at her face. Hiromi flipped aside, scarcely breaking pace ( _please let me be in time, please, kami-sama; let this not be in vain_ ).

 

A patch of tree and underbrush smoked with the fiery remnants of one of the Konoha shinobi’s last jutsu. The Kumo kunoichi withdrew behind this smokescreen, thinking it would shield her from Hiromi – it’d be useless against the Hyuuga, but her two teammates kept him occupied.

 

Unfortunately for her, Hiromi didn’t need sight to pinpoint her location.

 

Between her desperation and her Shimizu chakra coils, one handseal was enough. Hiromi gathered every bit of moisture in the air, even the water molecules formed from the recent combustion; it curled around her into a dragon, the condensed water growing horns and scales and long barbels of streaming water.

 

_If only for a real dragon right now…_

 

At a wordless command, it shot over her shoulder and rushed through the smoke, projectiles passing through its liquid body uselessly. The Kumo kunoichi’s defiant scream broke into a gurgle and some splashy struggling. Hiromi vaulted the burning brush and tore her way through the smoke, ignoring the woman’s twitching chakra signature and the odd angles at which some of her fading chakra channels were positioned.

 

Springing up from its downed prey, the water dragon reformed into its full splendor, curling and twisting gracefully through the air at her side as Hiromi rounded on the last two Kumo nin.

 

White flak jackets a stark contrast to their dark skin and the more muted hues of the damaged woodland around them, they stood over the downed Hyuuga, one of them clenching a kunai over his face. The Hyuuga’s earthy chakra stuttered and jumped as if rocked by an earthquake, but it wasn’t dead yet.

 

 _They’ll rip his eyes out, then kill him_. Hiromi scowled. _Oh, no, you don’t_.

 

The Kumo nin not crouched over the Hyuuga gasped out something – a warning? A taunt? A boast? A mangled jutsu name? Hiromi thought she caught the words ‘ghost’ and ‘bad luck’, but her advance gave him no time to orate further.

 

He sped through handseals and shot a bolt of lightning at her. She ducked aside, while her water dragon gracefully coiled out of the bolt’s path before smashing into him with the force of a hurricane. The rushing of water drowned out the crack of his neck snapping on impact. He crashed back against a tree, the water dragon dashing itself to pieces on the same trunk and its shed water ripping through his already lifeless body like blades.

 

A few paces away, the other Kumo shinobi had opted to skip the eye extraction. Clutching his bloodied kunai, he rolled to avoid the deadly splattering caused by the water dragon and came up hurling shuriken. Reusing the water still infused with her chakra, Hiromi wove handseals as she spun away. One shuriken caught her in the leg, ripping through the muscle of her calf.

 

The pain barely registered. Hiromi ignored the injury; it wasn’t enough to stop her. Forming into senbon and kunai, the water scattered by her dragon leapt from the dirt and nearby leaves at her enemy. Pressed on three sides, he yelped and gave ground.

 

“You might take down all twenty, but you’ll still die in the end, you ghost!” he screamed in his own language, forgetting to translate his taunts in the heat of the moment.

 

Thanks to language lessons attended on the advice of Akemi-oba-san (“For diplomatic purposes, and so you know how they plan to kill you,” she had said), Hiromi understood his words anyway, although the reference eluded her ( _some Kumo ghost story?_ ). “As long as I win!” she replied in the same, hands still locked in a seal. A second barrage of water made into pointy objects assailed him, forcing him back, and back, until he leapt into the thick, dark smoke of the burning brush and thought himself safe, for a moment.

 

He thought himself unseen. That was true. He thought himself undetectable. That was false.

 

Hiromi burst through the smokescreen, chakra scalpels swinging. In the midst of still falling back and rigging some kunai with wire ( _to create an electrified trap?_ ), the Kumo nin could only raise a kunai in his defense. One scalpel dug into his arm, the other his unprotected throat. Letting her scalpels fade, Hiromi kicked off his toppling body and headed back for the Hyuuga, although the bloody kunai and the cooling chakra signature already told her what she’d find.

 

Suppressing an exhausted sob, Hiromi added her inability to save this Konoha three-man squad to her rapidly growing list of failures. Shaky fingers retrieved a few more corpse scrolls. She was a medic; she carried _plenty_ of corpse scrolls, though she always beseeched the kami before each mission that she’d never have to use them. On this mission gone sour, however, she was using them the way some shinobi burned through explosive tags.

 

Settling down on her heels next to the Hyuuga and hoping she’d have the strength to stand back up again, Hiromi unfurled a corpse scroll over his bloody flak jacket and pulsed her chakra. His body vanished, sucked into the tiny pocket dimension of the scroll.

 

 _Rest easy, Hyuuga-san_ , she prayed silently, adapting the Uzushio interjection for fallen comrades. _Konoha will not forget you_.

 

Staggering to her feet and searching out the chakra residue indicating what had been, until a few minutes ago, strong and healthy chakra signatures, Hiromi tracked down a charred body in the smoking underbrush. A partially melted sword lay nearby. Small, red and white fan on the sleeve of the smoldering uniform. Hiromi sighed soundlessly. _We’d have been allies a century or two ago_. Opening up a corpse scroll, she repeated the process, repeating words she hoped would come true. _Rest easy, Uchiha-san. Konoha will not forget you_.

 

She’d just have to bring these scrolls along with her message to Konoha itself, at this rate.

 

Maybe she wouldn’t fail in delivering the dead to their home. Surely, the Shinigami would approve of her completing such an errand before he grabbed her himself.

 

The last traces of the third Konoha chakra signature were hard to find. Hiromi slumped against a tree, vainly trying to blink the black spots out of her vision, as her last wisps of chakra communicated with natural energy and mapped her surroundings. Biting back a groan, she shifted her weight to her feet once again and veered back towards the Hyuuga. In a mess of nearby crumpled ferns and melted wire she found the body of the last Konoha nin, who’d apparently been electrocuted to death.

 

Firmly turning her mind away from thoughts of Matsuri ( _don’t think of Araya!)_ , Hiromi bent down and bundled this last body into a scroll. _Rest easy, shinobi-san. Konoha will not forget you._

 

Only the thought that she, Hiromi, could not rest easy when she bore the deaths of so many teammates and allies on her back kept her from lying down herself and succumbing to the bone-deep, red-hot pain now ripping through her chakra system. With willpower alone, she forced herself to her feet, steadying herself against a tree. She blinked, but it was no use. Her vision was almost gone.

 

And she’d always had relatively few vision problems, compared to the rest of her albino clan.

 

She’d never make it to Konoha at this rate, let alone the borders of the Land of Fire.

 

She _had_ to make it.

 

Fully aware she was starting a countdown to her own death, Hiromi withdrew another soldier pill and swallowed it dry. She’d just have to race the countdown, because she couldn’t do much running as it was.

 

Maybe she shouldn’t have used so many high-level ninjutsu, but they were all suiton, and her pseudo-kekkei genkai at least halved the chakra cost of those. Besides, she was a medic. She had been trained to dodge and get away while her teammates handled threats. Her kenjutsu was non-existent, taijutsu was inadvisable against shinobi who could electrocute with a touch, and her weapons handling was good, not stellar. She couldn’t risk death in combat, not with her news.

 

She could fall after she delivered it.

 

Three ragged breaths, and the first traces of its artificial chakra seeped into her organs. Not even bothering to open her eyes, she pushed off the tree and set off yet again.

 

Not two minutes later, and she could feel the first hitches in her chakra system that warned her it was going into arrest.

 

 _You’re ripping your chakra system itself apart, Hiromi_ , she imagined her Akemi-oba-san saying, a touch of horrified concern to her usually even and unflappable tone. She ignored it and dragged herself onwards.

 

Seven minutes later, her chakra system went into arrest, and all circulation in her body screeched to a halt.

 

Her already gasping breath choked in her throat, and darkness swamped her mind.

 

* * *

 

 

( _Some distant part of Hiromi’s mind lingered, not the feeble physical brain that was gasping for oxygen and registering the panic and pain of her body literally shutting down on her, but the soul itself that would soon be ripped away by the Shinigami. It floundered around, remembering the corpse scrolls she bore and the news she had to deliver and everyone she cared about back in Uzushio._

No, no, _it wanted to plead,_ I need more time! You can take me, take my life, but I must save my village first!

_The darkness pressing on her from all sides did not respond, only tightened its grip on her. Some distant bit of sensation informed her of how ravaged her chakra system had become, of her organs slowly beginning to die. Her heart wasn’t beating, her chakra wasn’t circulating; every fiber of her body burned with agony, and even that agony was slipping away, leeched away by the cold uncaring darkness._

_Even thoughts of resistance faded. Hiromi fell silent and protested no more. It would achieve nothing. She had made her decisions, had dared the risks, and now she had to face the Shinigami with as much dignity as she could muster. She would not shame her ancestors by greeting them with a panicked and tear-stricken face._

_Oh, but her okaa-san… this would break her heart._

_If it had been possible, Hiromi’s spirit would have bowed in apology._ I’m sorry… I wasn’t enough.

 

_And then another presence seemed to materialize behind her, a chakra at once so familiar and unfamiliar that it reminded Hiromi of meeting a long-lost friend, and the darkness receded a little. Hiromi did not move, could not move, could not even speak or breathe, but the presence approached and stood in her shadow, a guardian in her last hour. Ethereal hands settled on her shoulders, steadying her._

Foolish daughter _, a voice rumbled, with the smallest hint of fondness._

 

_Strong and steady as a river, chakra rushed into her system, jump-starting its circulation. Her heart was shocked into beating steadily, abandoning its feeble quivering; her lungs obeyed her and drew in a breath with a gasp, nearly choking her. Not nearly enough to heal her completely, not nearly enough to bring her to her feet, but enough to temporarily chase away the Shinigami and the paralyzing darkness._

_The presence retreated, and Hiromi sank into oblivion.)_

* * *

 

Not too many kilometers from the border of the Land of Fire, a pleasant morning dawned across a small wooded valley in the Land of Hot Water. A fine rain had fallen intermittently throughout the night and on into the grayness of pre-dawn, but the clouds had scattered as the sun crept over the horizon. Moisture dripped off tree leaves and puddled in small dips in the ground, but the dirt pathways had not been churned into impassible mud.

 

As he led his oxcart along a narrow track through the woods, Saburou was intensely thankful for that particular fact. Camping out at night on the side of the road with the ox and his cart during the rain had not been the most fun, but it could have been so much worse if the rainfall had been heavier. It was important to keep those worse possibilities in mind, he felt. Otherwise, he would be tempted to more complaining, and complaining never got anything done.

 

He might not have liked that piece of his father’s advice when he was a boy, but he (a bit grudgingly) saw the truth of it now.

 

For instance, he could have complained about being the man selected from their tiny village to travel to the slightly larger nearby village to bargain for supplies and other things they could not produce themselves. Although he did not mind the faith in his bargaining skills, he could have complained about the lack of safety in traveling alone. He could have complained that the closest ‘nearby’ village was an entire day’s walk away, with an oxcart and with the winding dirt tracks that served for roads in this sparsely populated corner of the Land of Hot Water.

 

For that matter, he could complain that the nearest village was so far away because of their proximity to the border of the Land of Fire. A border between two or more of the Elemental Nations meant more than just a change in which daimyou to whom they owed their allegiance and a percentage of their crops as taxes. A border also meant shinobi patrols, with all the potential for violence that implied.

 

Most sensible people had no desire to live close to the site of hostile shinobi encounters. Shinobi might not always care about minimizing collateral damage, but civilians cared. Civilians were involved in the collateral damage.

 

Saburou was so wrapped up in mentally listing his reasons-for-not-actually-complaining that, when he glimpsed a splash of color out of the corner of his eye, he almost ignored it. Brown and green blotches were not that unusual in a forest. However, a patch of white caught his eye, and he jerked his head to do a double take.

 

Even so close to the Land of Fire, this forest could not hold a candle to the impressive stands of their southern neighbor. Saburou had heard of giant Hashirama trees that stood taller than palaces and were large enough around at their bases as some houses. Those trees were so grand, it was said, that their branches served as shinobi highways. Their roots soaked up all the nutrients from the earth, and their leaves soaked up all available light from the sky, so that little to no undergrowth could thrive beneath their canopies. This little forest in the Land of Hot Water was perfectly normal-sized ( _Thank kami-sama,_ Saburou mentally added), and it contained a perfectly normal amount of undergrowth where it had not been cleared away to maintain the narrow dirt track.

 

Therefore, Saburou couldn’t quite tell what the mysterious colored object was, due to various bushes and ferns in his line of sight.

 

 _Funny_ , he said to himself, _it almost looks like a body…_

He froze.

 

That meant nothing good.

 

A dead body lying out in the open, especially so close to his tiny home village, could only bode ill. At best, it meant bandits had taken up residence in this area. At worst, it meant shinobi business, and shinobi business only brought death and suffering to all concerned. Shinobi did not care how much damage they caused when they fought. Shinobi did not care about civilians caught in the crossfire, about fields of crops destroyed and children who would starve without that harvest, about homes smashed and burnt and water sources tainted with debris and rotting bodies.

 

Saburou might not have been born yet when the Great War between the shinobi of the various nations took place, but the stories and warnings passed on by fleeing refugees had trickled down from his parents and other elders of his home village. It had been a brutal year. The Land of Hot Water had allied with the Land of Fire to the south, seeking the protection of the much stronger nation. Had it protected them? Who could say? Saburou could not. For a time it seemed as if the shinobi would wreck this new system of hidden villages they had designed, and the continent would descend once more into the chaos of the Warring States Era, with shinobi clans trading and selling their murderous skills without an ounce of honor and with every daimyou and petty lord looking to grab as much land and resources as their hired blades could find. Even Hashirama of the Land of Fire, the man who had changed things, the man of whom it was said he could grow an entire forest with a clap of his hands, had fallen.

 

In the end, though, the Elemental Nations had pulled through. Daimyou kept their seats, for the most part. Shinobi villages – wherever they were – remained standing. And the rest of the world prayed to all the gods that they would never again see something so horrible.

 

Over the past few months, the gossip that Saburou had heard whenever he was picked to travel to the nearby village had changed. Tension was building. Shinobi were eyeing each other suspiciously from their hidden villages. Nobles were traveling less. Trade had grown uncertain.

 

And now a dead body.

 

Saburou almost kept on walking. He very much wanted to. He could just walk on, ignore it completely, and make his way back to his family and home village without involving himself in some stupid mess. With his luck, he’d stumble across some huge, secret, and important shinobi business and accidentally spark that war he and so many other people were desperately praying did not happen. Nope. He should just keep on walking.

 

In the end, however, that niggling little voice in the back of his head won out. It asked him, _What if the body isn’t dead?_ _What if it’s a person – alive, suffering? Can you walk away from that and still beg the gods to spare you and your family?_ When he tried to argue with himself, insisting that it couldn’t possibly be someone left alive and suffering out here, in the middle of nowhere, that niggling little voice countered, _Even if it is a dead body, it deserves burial so its spirit can rest. And also so it won’t attract more wild animals._

 

Sighing through his nose, Saburou halted the ox and cart. The ox gazed at him curiously with its liquid brown eyes. He patted it on the neck, trusting it not to wander off, and took a deep breath. Then he trudged off the track and through the undergrowth, picking up a decent-sized stick along the way.

 

He stopped, frowning.

 

It was a body, all right, facedown and motionless. And it was a shinobi. Saburou might not know too much about the inner workings of shinobi kind, no more than any other semi-observant civilian who did not want to die on the end of a kunai, but he knew enough to recognize a flak jacket and gear pouches when he saw them. Definitely not a samurai. Samurai wore distinctive armor and favored swords as their weapon.

 

 _Great. Just great._ Saburou sighed again, rubbing his stick with his thumb. _What should I do?_ _Shinobi travel in squads. They don’t like leaving bodies behind because other shinobi might learn their secrets. So… maybe the other shinobi in the squad are dead somewhere as well? Maybe they had no time to recover the body? Maybe this is a trap? Oh, no… I hope it’s not a trap. If it is, I’m probably already as good as dead._

Alarmed now, Saburou jerked back and scanned his surroundings. No shinobi jumped out at him from behind trees. No weapons suddenly flew at him from all directions. No explosions sounded in the distance. As a matter of fact, the only sounds he could hear were the small noises of animal life in the forest and the faintest breath of wind in the leaves overhead.

 

_Wait… faint breathing…_

 

With a half-stifled scream, Saburou jumped backwards, shakily holding his stick out towards the prone body. It would not give him much defense against a shinobi, but instincts were instincts.

 

The body didn’t move.

 

After several long moments, Saburou inched forward. When he was just within range, he extended his stick and gingerly poked the body. Nothing happened. Heart pounding, his mind screaming at him that he would be better off grabbing the ox and cart and running for the hills, he pushed at the body with his stick until it rolled over and the dead (dead?) shinobi lay on his back.

 

Or her back, as it turned out.

 

Saburou paused. He knew some shinobi had strange appearances, often rumored (when common folk like him gossiped about shinobi, anyway) to be the result of youkai lineage or the gift of a kami. As far as strangeness went, this wasn’t too bad. His first thought was still ‘human’ on seeing her face.

 

It might have even been a nice face, underneath all the mud and dried blood and scratches. Her strangely pale skin was smooth and wrinkle-free like that of a young woman’s, so Saburou could only assume that her hair was naturally white and not a sign of old age. She bore no obvious fatal injuries to indicate her manner of death; her greenish flak jacket was muddy and battered but intact, she wasn’t missing any limbs, and no large rents in her gray clothing spoke of fatal slash or stab wounds. The foliage and ground around her bore no telltale bloodstains.

 

It rather seemed as if she had just dropped dead.

 

Again, Saburou thought he heard faint breathing.

 

 _You’ve come this far, Saburou_ , he told himself. _You should have kept on walking while you had the chance. Now you feel obligated._

Praying to every deity he could think of that this would not end with his abrupt death, Saburou knelt and checked the shinobi for signs of life.

 

“I don’t believe it,” he muttered, sitting back on his heels.

 

The female shinobi was still alive. She had a pulse, if a weak one, and she was still breathing, although very shallowly.

 

What to do now, though? She was barely clinging to life as it was. It probably was not worth the effort of trying to haul her back to the village in some noble attempt at saving her life. Besides, she was a shinobi; what thanks would he get for such an action, even if it turned out successful? What if she recovered and on waking mistook him for an enemy, slaughtering him and his family? What if her squad members came looking for her and decided he had kidnapped her or something? What if her enemies came looking for her and threatened his village?

 

He really, really should have just kept on walking. He should just stand up and walk away. It was not worth getting any more involved in this matter.

 

Saburou scowled.

 

With an even more aggravated sigh, he grabbed the shinobi by her bandaged ankles and dragged her to the ox cart. In the process, he discovered that she was, surprisingly enough, at least as tall as he was and weighed not much less with her jacket and gear. She had a decent amount of muscle, too. He fervently began praying that she would not wake up and kill them all in their sleep. She did not so much as twitch, however, even when he rearranged the cart’s contents and roughly dumped her in the small space he had cleared.

 

One arm and one leg still dangled off the back of the cart. Saburou pursed his lips. He tucked her limbs in, even though part of him hoped she would roll off the cart, hit her head, and finally die. Whatever she was suffering from, she must have been truly out of it to remain so oblivious to her surroundings.

 

 _Huh. She really could have a nice face under all that mud and blood_ , Saburou mused, despite himself, as he stood behind the cart staring at the insensate shinobi. _Funny coloring and all._

He shook himself. Now was not the time to think such things about a shinobi who probably had the blood of dozens of villages like his own on her hands. He strode quickly around the cart to grab the ox’s rope halter and resume his journey.

 

 _Maybe she’ll die soon and this will all cease to be a problem_ , Saburou thought, trying not to sound too hopeful even in the privacy of his mind. Were there shinobi who could read minds? He hoped not.

 

Every step of the rest of the way back to his tiny village wracked his nerves. At every moment, he expected shinobi to swoop down upon him or for his world to suddenly erupt in flames and barrages of pointy things. Every few minutes, he glanced back at the cart from where he walked leading the ox, half-anticipating the shinobi’s body to suddenly explode. Every creak of the cart, every half-heard breeze through the leaves overhead, even his own quiet footsteps left him on edge.

 

Despite his nerves, however, nothing happened. A few hours later, he arrived home safe and sound, right on schedule two days after he set out for the nearest larger town. If only there weren’t that shinobi in his cart to complicate matters…

 

Desperately hoping that everyone in the village would be occupied with their own work and would not have the time and energy to stick their noses into his business (Saburou knew it was too much to hope for that they would not have the inclination to do so), he edged around the largest concentration of huts. He wished he had thought to disguise the shinobi’s presence on the cart, perhaps stuck a basket on her head or something. Maybe, if she woke up, it would perplex her long enough for him to run screaming and thereby reveal himself as a civilian and thus (hopefully) not worth killing.

 

Perhaps the gods were with him, for once. He encountered no one as he led the ox and cart to his home on the outskirts of the tiny village. Stopping behind the hut, he set about unpacking the supplies while the ox drank from the trough. With another muttered prayer and a few grunts of effort, he lifted the shinobi off the cart, dragging her into the middle of the hut. After a moment’s thought, he went to go unhook the ox from the cart and care for it before searching for his kaa-san in the fields.

 

Even if she was a shinobi without morals, he was _not_ going to remove a woman’s clothing in a (likely futile) effort to figure out what ailed her when better options existed. 

 

That did not mean he looked forward to explaining.

 

As he expected, the explanation was supremely awkward. He started off by assuring kaa-san that he had made it to the nearby village and conducted business, no problem, hoping that would placate her. However, something guilty or anxious in his manner must have tipped his kaa-san off. He could never sneak anything past her. Throughout it all, she stared at him with the suspicious scowl she’d always worn whenever he tried to excuse away some misdeed of his childhood with fantastic tales.

 

Maybe it had; maybe it hadn’t. It was difficult to tell. No, he hadn’t taken Ichirou-oji’s repaired tools to him yet, because he had come to find her first. Yes, the ox was fine. No, the cart had not broken down. Yes, he had haggled until he got reasonable trades for everything; he had been doing this for a couple of years now. Yes, there was a reason he had come to find her right away. What was that reason? Well…

 

“Ifoundahalf-deadshinobiinthewoodsandIbroughtherhome,” he finally blurted, all in one breath. Cringing, he closed his eyes, afraid to watch his kaa-san’s reaction.

 

She finally responded with a flat, “…What.”

 

Saburou winced, well and truly babbling now. “I know, I know, it was stupid. I should have just left her to get eaten by wolves or something and not get involved and maybe get dragged into shinobi business, but then I would have felt bad and she looked so _dead_ and I didn’t know _why_. And letting her get eaten seemed rude and plus the dead body might attract more predators, and what if there’s some big threat in the forest we don’t know about yet, and then that means…”

 

His kaa-san sighed. His runaway tongue thankfully screeching to a halt, Saburou suddenly wondered if he had picked up that bad habit from her. She gave him no further time to contemplate it, asking, “Well? Is she bleeding out in the house?”

 

He could tell she was already thinking of what a mess it would be to clean up, and hastened to reassure her. “No, no!” he said, waving his hands. “She’s not bleeding at all! At least, I don’t think so. I think there was some dried blood, but it might not have been hers. She didn’t look injured at all, really. Just… out. Unconscious. I’d say she looked like she was sleeping, except most people don’t look that muddy and battered when they’re just sleeping.”

 

“Poisoned?”

 

Saburou threw his hands up in the air. “How would I know?!”

 

His kaa-san sighed again. “Fine. I’m coming.”

 

They walked quickly back to the house, Saburou picking up the pace once the thought occurred to him of a neighbor wandering up to their house and spotting the comatose shinobi lying in their doorway. However, no one seemed to have dropped by. His kaa-san sighed yet again when she saw how he had dumped the shinobi right in the walkway, and she directed him to drag the unconscious woman to a mat while she fetched some water and a rag.

 

With some effort, they figured out the clasps on the shinobi’s flak jacket and eased her out of it, laying it aside. Her shoes were slipped off and lined up next to the door. The weird metal faceplate and clear visor detached after some struggling – with no sign of what had been holding it in place, so Saburou suspected ninja magic – and were tossed on the pile.

 

Similarly, they unlooped her gear pouches from her belt and set them next to the jacket, Saburou taking extra care to not let anything pointy escape. What if she were carrying a bunch of needles or knives tipped in some exotic, lethal poison? He’d be dead in seconds! His kaa-san could be dead in seconds! Fearful, but also a little curious, he opened one of the pouches to find… rolls of bandages? Salves? Small bottles full of even smaller pills?

 

“Medical supplies,” his kaa-san observed, as he clumsily re-packed everything and tossed the pouch aside. “Well, at least that shows some common sense on her part.”

 

Red-faced, Saburou turned away while his kaa-san checked the unconscious shinobi in more detail for injuries and cleaned away as much of the mud and blood as she could. From his mother’s muttered comments, he learned that almost all of the dried blood must have belonged to someone else – Saburou suppressed a shudder – or the shinobi had somehow healed herself with shinobi magic. His kaa-san spent several frustrated minutes scrubbing at what she thought were injuries or scars on the unconscious woman’s face before deciding that they must be markings of some sort and giving up.

 

Sitting back on her heels and wringing out her wet rag one last time, his kaa-san said, “I’m done now, Saburou. You can stop quietly dying in the corner.”

 

Saburou protested under his breath as he shuffled around. His kaa-san was staring down at the unconscious woman’s body, her expression grim but puzzled. Thanks be to all the kami, the woman was fully clothed again. (Saburou could already imagine his sisters’ voices teasing him about being intimidated by pretty girls and scowled, firmly pushing that thought away.)

 

Minus the mud and dried blood, the shinobi’s skin seemed as pale as the moon. Without her jacket and supply pouches, she looked a little smaller and somehow much more human, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He decided to concentrate on her white hair. That was unnatural enough. It was a good thing to focus on.

 

“Well,” his kaa-san began, “I can’t find anything. Nothing serious, anyway. She has a few small cuts and bruises, but nothing to tell us why she’s like this. She’s breathing, if faintly. I don’t know if her coloring is off since she might just naturally be this pale. She’s a little cold. Not surprising, given we don’t know how long she was lying out there in the woods. Fetch a couple of blankets, Saburou.”

 

Saburou did _not_ squawk, thank you very much. “We’re keeping her?!”

 

His kaa-san shot him a look, already dipping a clean rag into water to try and hydrate their unexpected guest. “Of _course_ we’re keeping her, now that you’ve gone to the trouble of dragging her home and getting me involved.”

 

“But I thought…”

 

“That this is all incredibly foolish? Yes. Yes, it is. There’s no telling what she’ll do if she wakes up. However, she now has a chance to die in peace and be properly buried, instead of being torn apart by some animal. And, if she wakes up – _if_ , because only the kami-sama know what’s wrong with her – if she wakes up and doesn’t kill us all, then she can be on her way.”

 

Clutching the blankets, Saburou plopped down next to his mother, watching as she gingerly tried to ease some water down the shinobi’s throat. It was slow going. The shinobi never so much as twitched. Saburou found himself studying her hands, looking for scars and other evidence of her bloody, murderous lifestyle. Instead, he found himself admiring the smooth gray hue of her three-quarter-sleeved shirt and loose pants, wondering what material her mesh armor beneath it was made of, imagining what could have brought her so low. She had seemed so intimidating at first, but now his eyes took in the tired frown frozen on her lips, the bruised skin beneath her eyes, the unhealthy pallor of her skin. He was struck again by how suddenly human the shinobi seemed. He fidgeted.

 

“I’ve never seen a shinobi this close before,” he commented.

 

His kaa-san did not even bother giving him a look. “I know that,” she said dryly.

 

“It’s just… she looks so much more, well, _normal_ than I thought,” he admitted.

 

“She’s probably at least mostly human,” his mother assured him, still in that same dry tone of voice.

 

“But she has white hair!” Saburou almost whined.

 

“You say that as if you’ve forgotten you’ve met people with white hair, Saburou,” his kaa-san chided. “For shame, Saburou. Kenichi-jii will be heartbroken to learn of your memory loss.”

 

Saburou’s face flamed. He wanted to bury himself in the blankets and not come out, but he knew his kaa-san would only mock him further for it. “What I meant is that she doesn’t look old enough to have white hair,” he clarified, salvaging what dignity he could.

 

His kaa-san shrugged. “It could be worse.”

 

Saburou leaned forward, peering at the shinobi more closely. “And what are those red marks on her face for? Four of ‘em. Three thin marks on her cheeks and chin, and a red diamond on her forehead. Do they mean something?”

 

“Maybe it indicates what rank she holds, or what clan she belongs to. I don’t know, Saburou. If she wakes up, ask her yourself.”

 

“Maybe I will!”

 

“You’re certainly staring at her closely enough. That curious, Saburou? Or is it something else, hmm? She’s not that bad to look at, I suppose.”

 

“ _Kaa-san!”_ Saburou practically vibrated with indignation, spilling blankets as he sprang to his feet. He should have expected this, really. His kaa-san loved to tease him, and with both of his older sisters married it was only natural that everyone in the village suddenly concern themselves with his own marriage. Not that he had one planned. They just thought he should.

 

Sure, maybe he thought Touka-chan was kinda pretty. Sure, maybe he turned into a stammering mess around her. Still, it didn’t merit this constant hounding.

 

“I’m gonna deliver Ichirou-jii his tools,” he called, making his escape out the door.

 

* * *

 

 

Like someone drowning who manages to break the surface of the heaving water and gulp a blessed lungful of air before being submerged once more, Hiromi woke once or twice. Both times, she could barely speak, let alone move. Her chakra system burned, the coils stretched raw and the channels constricted from too much abuse. Her reserves sat at empty, every tiny shred of chakra her battered system managed to produce poured into mitigating the damage she’d done to herself. Her limbs were heavy and numb, her vision no more than a blur.

 

The first time she woke, she lasted just long enough to register the unfamiliar thatched underside of a _nouka_ – a peasant farmer’s _minka_ – and a few civilian-weak chakra signatures nearby before sinking into oblivion once more.

 

The second time, Hiromi raised herself on one elbow after some struggling, blinking blearily at the blankets that had been thrown over her. Her every limb still ached with weariness and the agony in her chakra system had subsided to a dull throb. Shying away from investigating or guessing the extent of the damage, she instead focused on the likelihood that she would live. The prospect was so unbelievable, Hiromi could only blink, staring into the darkened interior of the house without really seeing it.

 

The joke had always been that Hiromi was nearly as durable as an Uzumaki – a durability Hiromi had interiorly acknowledged without ever really thinking about it. It had just been another of her weird traits, not worth further consideration as she waved away the joke by pointing out her lack of red hair. She’d always trained hard, she had a lot of chakra for a Shimizu, and she kept healthy habits; why shouldn’t she have a sturdy constitution? Still, in this situation only an Uzumaki should have been able to survive. She had been _dying_.

 

Hiromi frowned faintly. Just how many soldier pills had she taken, in the end? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember how many Kumo nin she had torn to pieces in her rampage through the valleys of Hot Water. She vaguely remembered finding a Konoha patrol – but too late, too late. She had taken another pill then, she thought. But she wasn’t sure. It was all so fuzzy, and she could barely keep her thoughts straight right now as it was.

 

Had something happened, when she collapsed? She must have collapsed. She’d contemplate the exact mechanics later, too tired to even self-diagnose. But she could swear that something had happened – something important.

 

Something had saved her.

 

Or someone?

 

But she couldn’t remember.

 

Shakily exhaling, Hiromi lowered herself back onto the mat and closed her eyes. Sleep followed shortly thereafter.

 

The third time Hiromi woke, it was to hushed voices outside. Only a few civilian-level chakra signatures lurked nearby, possibly the same ones she had noticed earlier. Slowly slipping a hand out from beneath the blankets, she pressed a finger to the packed earthen floor. Small clusters of faint chakra signatures suggested she lay in a house at the edge of a small peasant village. With all the concentration she could muster, she stretched her sense out as far as she dared, zooming out her focus so she wasn’t sensing the movement of chakra within living systems as much as she was simply picking up collections of strong chakra – sacrificing detail for distance.

 

The closest cluster of shinobi-strong signatures was kilometers to the south west. A Konoha outpost, perhaps. Similar clusters dotted the horizon farther away, probably outlining the border of the Land of Fire. No similar clusters shone in her chakra sense to the west; the Land of Rice Fields had only a measly little shinobi village, unlike the (comparatively) big and bright beacon of Yugakure to the north. Shimogakure was a similar beacon to the northeast, on the edge of her range. The bright warmth of all the fiery chakra signatures gathered in Konohagakure, farther away than Yugakure, only appeared on the furthest edge of her range thanks to its intensity. Uzushio was beyond that invisible horizon, as was Kumogakure.

 

Hiromi suppressed a stab of worry. More important than useless fretting was the consideration that she had not been captured and carted off by Kumo nin for any information she might carry and for her bloodline. In fact, she didn’t detect any Kumo shinobi within the average range of the Mind’s Eye of the Kagura. Presumably, they had all gone off to attack Uzushio – or Konoha, she supposed, but she felt Uzushio a likelier target.

 

She remembered the chakra sensation of Kumo’s army, like an enormous thundercloud gathering above the horizon, but she could not detect it anywhere now. Of course, some chakra suppression or other method of hiding chakra traces from sensors was likely in employ, especially if Kumo aimed to attack another hidden village. Nevertheless, it bothered Hiromi that she couldn’t locate it.

 

Uncertainty was lethal.

 

Intellectually, Hiromi knew Uzushio could send Kumo’s army packing, although not without damage to itself. Realistically, she worried about what that damage might entail. She also considered Kumogakure smart enough not to attack Uzushio unprepared. Had they allied with any other hidden village – perhaps Kiri?

 

Situated on an island in the midst of the sea, Uzushio considered Susanoo a patron god who brought order to their waters and wreaked utter destruction upon their foes – at least, those inhabitants of Uzushio who venerated the old gods. The Shimizu were such. Hiromi shot off a silent prayer that the god of sea and storms would visit his wrath upon Kumo if they dared touch her home.

 

Fighting off another pang of worry, she opened her eyes, blinking up at the thatched roof once again. Thanks be to the kami, her vision was clearer now, any remaining bleariness due more to sleep and tiredness than actual damage. She still squinted slightly against the early morning sunlight filtering through the small windows of the farmhouse. She might have escaped most of the usual vision defects that plagued her clan due to their albinism, but she hadn’t escaped the photophobia. Virtually all Shimizu struggled with photophobia. She squashed the automatic impulse to reach for the polarized visor she wore at home to filter incoming light. Although… where was her happuri with a built-in version of that visor?

 

Hiromi propped herself up on her elbows, brushing back the blankets covering her. No happuri, no flak jacket, no gear and medical pouches, no shoes… ah, there they were, stacked neatly up against the wall near the door. She couldn’t exactly fault whatever kind peasants had found her unconscious self and taken her home for wanting to separate a potentially hostile shinobi from her weapons. She had more in her storage seals, but she needn’t tell them that.

 

 _Speaking of which…_ All too aware of the gaping emptiness in her reserves, Hiromi carefully increased the chakra flow through the skin in her forearms, breathing a silent sigh of relief when the black swirling lines of her storage seals appeared around her wrists. A careful probe proved they still held all their contents. She hadn’t been sure whether her close brush with death had triggered the rebound functions, dumping all her supplies home with her okaa-san via linked seals. It seemed she had been dying but had not been any more than only mostly dead before… whatever it had been… had pulled her back from the brink.

 

Hiromi was just contemplating whether or not to scoot over and grab her happuri when a young man in plain peasant clothing – one of the civilian chakra signatures apparently belonging to this house – walked into the room, carrying fuel for the _irori_. Their eyes locked. They stared at each other for a few seconds, one in vague, tired curiosity and one in complete shock.

 

Then the young man dropped what he was carrying with a yelp and spun away, hollering for his kaa-san as he went.

 

Hiromi stared dully after him, mildly offended. _…Am I truly that terrifying?_

 

By the time the young man returned with an older woman, presumably his mother, Hiromi had carefully folded and set aside the blankets before retrieving her happuri and affixing it to her face with the barest pulse of chakra. No longer squinting, she faced their arrival with as mild of a facial expression as she could muster.

 

“Good morning. I see you’re awake,” the woman noted conversationally. “I hope Saburou here didn’t offend you too much. No, no, don’t talk yet. I’m sure your voice is very hoarse. Let me fetch you some water, and then you can talk.”

 

Enough of a medic to drink the water in small sips without being told, Hiromi concentrated on seeming as harmless as possible – some shinobi might scoff at the idea, but she preferred peaceable interactions with civilians. She currently had no need to dampen her chakra, but she could concentrate on moving slowly and non-threateningly, also not an issue in her weakened state. She thanked the woman formally for the water and for her hospitality. The woman raised her eyebrows.

 

“Well, aren’t you a polite one,” she commented to no one in particular. “Now, can you tell me how you came to be lying in a forest three days ago, dead to the world?”

 

 _Three days ago?_ Hiromi hid a wince. Her message might be useless now. If the army of Kumo shinobi had kept up their blitzkrieg pace, they might have reached Uzushio by now. They could have reached Konoha by now, if that had been their destination instead. Either village could be the site of intense fighting at that very moment. All of Hiromi’s loyalty to her home village and to her comrades there urged her to get up and run to its aid, and she regretfully wrangled that urge under control. As she was, she’d be of no good to anyone.

 

She had meant to reply to the woman’s inquiry with something vague along the lines of, “I collapsed while delivering an important message,” or possibly, “I collapsed after fighting too many enemies,” but what came out instead was a blunt, “I was dying the same way my otou-san did.”

 

The young man, Saburou, who had been flitting about helplessly behind his mother as if he really had no clue what to do in this situation, suddenly flinched. His mother frowned faintly, in concern or in old grief or possibly both.

 

Hiromi did wince that time. _Why am I still dwelling on that fact? I’ve barely thought of him for years, and only this last mission gone wrong has brought him to mind again._ “I’m sorry. I’m doing this all wrong,” she said, inclining slightly. She would get to her feet to perform a proper bow, but she did not want to try that just yet – falling flat on her face would not make a good impression. “My name is Hiromi, a medical shinobi of Uzushio. Please take care of me.”

 

Mother and son both seemed slightly taken aback by her politeness. Briefly, Hiromi wondered if they had encountered any spectacularly rude, violent, or elitist shinobi specimens before. They responded in kind, however, not remarking on the lack of a last name – Hiromi had reverted to the safety practice of the Warring States Era in not giving her clan name, although anyone with eyes in their head and the most basic knowledge of the Shimizu would be able to put two and two together on seeing her coloring and markings.

 

The woman’s name proved to be Meisha and the son’s Saburou. With the death of his father and the marriage of his sisters, he and his mother lived alone in the farmhouse. Saburou had found her on the side of a track in the woods three days ago and brought her home, even though he had been unsure she’d live. Given his wariness or just general awkwardness in Hiromi’s presence now, she wondered why he had bothered. She didn’t ask, however.

 

Instead, she made a proper explanation of her presence minus all the detail, simply stating that she had been sent on a diplomatic mission with her teammates but that the shinobi from Lightning had betrayed them and killed the rest of her squad. She had then exhausted herself trying to reach an allied village to provide a warning.

 

Saburou fairly squawked before he got his reaction under control. “I knew it,” he muttered. “It was nothing good.”

 

His mother spent less time bemoaning what was done and instead focused on what it meant for their future. “The shinobi of Lightning betrayed you? Betrayed your village?” she repeated. “What will that lead to?”

 

Hiromi tried not to clench her hands too obviously. An Uzushio besieged by lightning danced on the outskirts of her mind. “The squad leader was sure it would mean war,” she answered quietly.

 

“How big of a war?”

 

“I do not know.” Hiromi forcibly relaxed her hands. “Kumo has mustered an army to attack either Konoha or Uzushio. Konoha, Uzushio, and Suna are all allied, so it would be foolish for Kumo to attack one of them without major allies of its own. If Uzushio is the target, Kiri would not resist the chance to join in the attack. They have hated Uzushio longer than Kiri has stood as a shinobi village. That’s five out of the six largest hidden villages. If they all declare war, there is no way Iwa will stay out of it. They always stick their noses where they don’t belong. And that would mean,” she finished, noting the slightly confused expressions of the two civilians, “a second shinobi world war.”

 

Saburou muttered a curse word under his breath. Despite her distaste for foul language, Hiromi could not blame him much. The prospect filled her with just as much dread, now that she had the unfortunate leisure to contemplate it.

 

“So, you’ll want to be on your way soon,” his mother observed. “You are welcome to stay here until you’ve recovered your strength. Then you can return to your home village.”

 

Hiromi gratefully accepted the offer. With a goal to work towards, she shoved away any guilt and lingering feelings of inadequacy. She had no time to pity herself. She needed to recover and rush to Konoha before making her way home.

 

After a meal, Hiromi could no longer delay in the inevitable and sat down to assess her condition. As a sensor and a medic, she had a general overview of her health and chakra system at all times without any in-depth scan, but to get details she had to perform a diagnosis jutsu.

 

Very cautiously, all too mindful of how most of her chakra was circulating in her body because no excess even existed to be squirreled away in her reserves and how Akemi-oba-san would become the lecturing Akemi-shishou if she caught her running this risk, Hiromi focused. Her hands slowly and precisely formed four seals: Rat, Ram, modified Ox, Tiger.

 

“ _Chiyu Kensa no Jutsu_ ,” she whispered.

 

As far as iryou-ninjutsu went, the Healing Scan Technique wasn’t very difficult to learn or perform. It didn’t require much chakra and called for only decent levels of chakra control, unlike iryou techniques that actually healed. Instead, it only diagnosed any bodily injuries or abnormalities that needed to be medically addressed. The kicker came in that the user needed extensive biological and medical knowledge to properly interpret the results of the jutsu. However, all iryou techniques needed that knowledge to be utilized to their fullest potential.

 

Physically, Hiromi had little injury. Even the gash on her right calf had mostly healed, although the associated chakra vessels through the muscle there remained suspiciously weak. She was still dead tired, a consequence of her near-fatal chakra exhaustion, and she’d only be fit for moving around unaided in a day and a half. Combat readiness would come at least two days after that. All of that was as she expected. Changing the parameters and focus of the diagnostic jutsu, she examined her chakra system.

 

She winced.

 

 _Well, I certainly didn’t escape the Shinigami unscathed_ , she thought to herself, breathing deeply before worry could attack her mind once more.

 

Carrying too much of the soldier pills’ artificial chakra had incited an inflammatory response in her chakra channels; they had constricted, resisting the flow of what they perceived as hostile chakra.

 

Soldier pills contained nutrients for the physical body and a stimulant to produce more chakra in the consumer’s own coils, but they also contained extracts of several natural compounds from chakra-rich plants. The chakra from those extracts provided the initial jump-start of chakra from the pills, with that forcibly produced in the consumer’s own coils picking up the slack once the initial burst was exhausted; however, the alien nature of that initial chakra did not sit well with everyone. Some shinobi could not take soldier pills due to allergic reactions of the physical body or of the chakra system itself. Hiromi had never had problems with soldier pills before, but then again she had never overdosed on them before, either.

 

(Hiromi was aware of the academic debate over whether the energy found in plants and animals counted as ‘natural energy’ or as ‘chakra’, with strong arguments for both positions. Some researchers held the middle ground and classified the energy in plants as ‘natural energy’ and that in animals as ‘chakra’. Some philosophers argued that it couldn’t be chakra since plants and animals did not have rational souls; others argued that plants and animals had souls of their own and could very well have chakra composed of physical and spiritual energies, although it might be more lopsided to the physical than human chakra. Hiromi herself had wondered if a food chain existed in the chakra realm, with natural energy being consumed by plants to become plant chakra, which was then consumed by animals to become animal chakra, with human chakra being merely an advanced form of animal chakra. Once or twice, she’d been tempted to pen her theories and submit them for peer consideration. No more than that, though. After an incident in the R&D department that ended in hurled clipboards and flung accusations, she avoided academic spats once the memos being traded got a little too snappish.)

 

So Hiromi’s chakra channels had inflamed in response to the non-human chakra contained in the soldier pills. Check. This inflammation had led to constriction of the chakra channels throughout her body, in multiple places to a dangerous degree: chakra stenosis. Check. Meanwhile, the stimulants in the soldier pills prompting the production of more chakra had overtaxed her chakra coils, stressing them until they simply shut down. Chakra coil failure meant no production of new chakra at all, not even the small amount requisite for life.

 

She might have been able to subsist on what little chakra remained in her body, but such was not to be the case. Her chakra coils had completely shut down. Not only did chakra coils produce chakra and apply nature transformation, they were also responsible for circulating chakra throughout the system. Her chakra coils had failed, chakra circulation in her body had screeched to a halt, and as a direct result her circulatory system had also shut down. Her heart had stopped.

 

 _I really was dying_ , Hiromi noted uneasily. _What saved me?_

 

Try as she might to understand how she had been pulled back from that final brink, she could not fathom it. All she could recall was darkness.

 

Somewhere in that darkness, something ( _someone_ ) had restarted her heart, had given her the chakra boost needed to rekindle her system’s coils.

 

Almost… _almost_ could Hiromi remember a presence. Wistfulness stabbed through her, sudden and foreign and yet as familiar as if she had spent every day of her life walking by its side. She wanted… she thought.

 

_No. Don’t think about it. It can’t be._

 

Setting the question aside for later consideration, Hiromi turned her attention again to her chakra system itself. Pulling up her mental map of it, she noted every constricted chakra channel and dangerous stenosis, every stressed tenketsu, every tear in the chakra capillaries and whether she’d need to mend them or leave them to heal on their own. Then she let the scan jutsu drop, letting out a long breath.

 

It would be at least a day and a half before she’d have enough chakra to even think of addressing the damage her chakra system had sustained, even if tweaking and repairing her own chakra system would require less energy than tending to that of another. Even then, she wouldn’t have enough to fully mend it, and using what chakra she’d manage to gather would set back her battle-readiness further.

 

At best, and if she was careful, she’d be able to correct only the most severe damages – the instances of stenosis throughout, which would pose a serious problem the instant her chakra circulation was pushed to moderate or heavy usage, and that slightly worrying gash in a major chakra channel in her right calf that was still hemorrhaging tendrils of chakra into her flesh. Hiromi vaguely remembered sustaining an injury there, but she could not recall if and when she had healed it. Regardless, only a thin line marked her skin to show outwardly for it.

 

Hiromi brushed her fingers over it, vaguely let down by this small reminder. Given the time and resources, she could make a full recovery. Provided she waited long enough for her strength to return, she could knit back together all the frayed ends of her chakra system and soothe out the last bits of damage her recklessness with the soldier pills had done to her body. She could walk away from this with only a slim scar to show for it.

 

She had drifted into the Shinigami’s grasp, and she could walk right out of it.

 

She could shake off death with only a scratch to show for it.

 

However, just as a pale scar on her skin could hide a torn channel hemorrhaging chakra into a metaphysical bruise, a healthy or healed body could hide a mind and spirit still bleeding all over the place.

 

Hiromi’s gaze drifted to her flak jacket and her thoughts to the corpse scrolls she had filled. Ignoring the exhaustion in her limbs and soul and drawing her knees up to her chest, she curled her arms around them and rested her forehead on them.

 

If she told herself enough times that she did not deserve to cry for those she had failed, maybe she wouldn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Chiyu Kensa no Jutsu_ /Healing Scan Technique, its handseals, and its general purpose come from _Harry Potter and the Secrets of Konoha_ by BackslashEcho and are used with permission. I highly recommend that story (especially to fellow fans of Genma out there), so go check it out!
> 
> Disclaimer: I have no medical training of any sort. Therefore, there may be errors in any medical jargon I use or in the depictions of medical conditions. Any readers with the appropriate knowledge should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or offer suggestions on how to better depict said conditions. I'll explain what's going on in this chapter in plainer words: Hiromi overdoses on soldier pills (in her defense, although she knows better, she's exhausted, emotionally compromised, and desperate), her chakra system shuts down (goes into chakra arrest), which prompts her circulatory system to shut down (cardiac arrest, presumably one with a shockable rhythm such as ventricular fibrillation). A chakra infusion forces her chakra system to begin functioning again and has a defibrillation effect on her heart (either directly or as a necessary side-effect). End result: she's no longer dying, but her chakra system has sustained heavy damage.
> 
> Feel free to speculate on who/what saved Hiromi. I will eventually answer this question… probably like 60 chapters from now. Whoops.
> 
> Did I go all-out Technobabble on the chakra system? Yeah, I probably did. And I shall do so in the future. I like Technobabble. I like organized magic systems. I like things making sense.
> 
> Relevant Character Death Toll: 15


	5. Wrath and Ruin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: If I owned Naruto, yeah, the fall of Uzushio would probably have been as dramatic as the fall of Gondolin. So… who was Ecthelion, who was Glorfindel, who was Maeglin, will there be an Eärendil, and does that make a jinchuuriki the equivalent of a Balrog?

Roughly two hundred years ago, Uzumaki Akira claimed as her own the stratovolcanic archipelago closest to the eastern coast of the Land of Fire, christening it Uzu no Kuni, the Land of Whirlpools. A smattering of tiny islands crumbling off into the sea as a comet’s trail behind a much larger island, all overlooked by a few steep-sided volcanos, this region became a new home for her clan and their allies. Over the next few years, their numbers swelled as others fled the chaos of a mainland embroiled in the Warring States Era. Many flocked to Akira’s banner as she declared that she and all those who lived in her land would never serve another daimyou, that she would never again sell her people’s skills or lives to another man who would treat them as disposable pawns to kill, lie, cheat, steal, and die for his avarice, his anger, his petty jealousy.

 

Uzu no Kuni knew no daimyou.

 

What became the Land of Whirlpools had long been contested by the various feudal lords of the Land of Fire and the Land of Water, the two great powers between whom those islands lay, with other parties occasionally butting in to steal land and resources as they could. Pirates, privateers, and scavengers roamed the seas, and raiding clans with strange and barbaric kekkei genkai from the larger island chains to the east in Water posed a continual threat. To cap it all off, a volcano in that archipelago had erupted recently, killing most of the inhabitants and temporarily driving off any occupying forces.

 

Standing on the eastern coast of the Land of Fire, her toes in the surf and her eyes fixed on the plume of ash rising on the horizon, Uzumaki Akira had told her people: _We can handle this. Are we not descended from Usha, the goddess of dawn who rides each day over the waves of the eastern seas in a golden chariot? Be it volcano or youkai or bijuu or kami yet more dire, we shall defeat it with our seals and our chains and take this land as our home, and none shall wrest it from us._

 

As she spoke, so it happened. The Uzumaki crossed over the sea to the archipelago, rendering aid to the surviving inhabitants and over the next two years laying down a web of fuuinjutsu across the archipelago so powerful that never again would the volcanoes erupt without their consent. Then, over the following two years, the Uzumaki wove another web of fuuinjutsu, laying over the waters surrounding the islands and thereby taking control of the seas until the very whirlpools spun at their will and they could calm the waves or let them rage against their foes. Only then, when the Uzumaki had tamed the land and the sea, did Akira proclaim the islands to be Uzu no Kuni, their home.

 

The daimyou of the neighboring lands protested, for they all much preferred those islands to be their property. They sent samurai, they sent shinobi, they sent sellswords and pirates and raiders and diplomats, all of whom Akira turned away. _I have not escaped from the rule of one lord to so easily swear myself and my people to another_ , she proclaimed. _These lands are our home now. Peace I shall have with you and all of my neighbors, if peace you desire, for my heart is tired and full of hurts. All who come to trade with Uzu shall be treated equally and fairly. However, if you come with arms to take our home from us, then we shall fight for our peace._

The wiser lords backed down, and only sent envoys and merchants to treat and trade with Uzu no Kuni. The prouder and more foolish daimyou did not back down.

 

 _Then fight we shall_ , Akira announced, giant golden chains twisting out from her back and gleaming with ancient chakra, as they caught up soldiers in service to Water and swept them off a cliff.

Off and on for several years, the Uzumaki fought to earn their neutrality and the recognition of the Land of Whirlpools as a sovereign state in the Elemental Nations. At the end, the Uzumaki stood firm and no longer beset by foes, acknowledged as their own nation by their neighbors. Now they could rest more easily. As she returned – for good, she hoped – to her island alongside her victorious people, Uzumaki Akira looked around herself at the many faces walking with her and wondered – amid all the sorrow and toil and death, when had the number of her comrades grown so great?

 

She had her own people, of course, all who bore the Uzumaki name: a few hundred redheads strong, who had followed her lead faithfully for so long. With the Uzumaki had traveled the Miura, former samurai of Taira descent and steadfast allies, their vassal clan for generations now, who possessed no kekkei genkai of their own but whose craftsmanship of arms and armor and more items were highly regarded across the Elemental Nations.

 

Yet the Uzumaki and the Miura had only been the beginning. Several other smaller clans had joined the Uzumaki’s cause since Akira left the mainland, attracted to a leader who would not abandon or betray them for gold and delighted at the thought of an island home with volcano-rich soil set in trading waters. Even individuals and civilians had joined the growing Uzu no Kuni, swearing allegiance to the Uzumaki. They had proven their loyalty, and the Uzumaki had accepted them into their hearts.

 

Not all of the Uzumaki’s associates had been expected, however.

 

The Fuyuchi Clan had begun as an uneasy alliance. Akira and her shinobi had been beating off an attack on one shoreline from the giant, shark-summoning Hoshigaki when they stumbled across an encampment of another Water shinobi clan. Violence might have erupted, if not for a woman barking, _We have no quarrel with the redheads_. Her clansmembers reluctantly settled back, obeying her but still eyeing the Uzumaki warily. The clan’s leader, a small woman with unsettling pale eyes and smooth black hair, introduced herself as Fuyuchi Chiyo and asked if the Uzumaki considered themselves allies of the Houzuki Clan.

 

Akira replied in the negative, for the current daimyou of the Land of Water had hired the Houzuki to attack them just four months ago. Chiyo smiled, a smile far sharper than it had any right to be, especially since she had not filed her teeth into points like some members of the clan she had just mentioned. _Would you consider becoming enemies of the Houzuki, then?_ she asked. _They have kidnapped some of our own, and we cannot fight them alone. We shall assist you against the Hoshigaki if you help us against the Houzuki_.

 

Against the advice of her counsellors, Akira had agreed. The Uzumaki pursued the Houzuki raiding party, but the Fuyuchi captives had been slain by their captors before they could be rescued. Fuyuchi Chiyo stumbled through the water- and blood-soaked campground like a blind woman, collapsing to her knees next to the lifeless body of her teenage daughter. For several long moments, she made no sound. Then she screamed at the cloudy sky, sobs wracking her small frame and tears pouring down her cheeks until the heavens had no choice but to open the floodgates and wash the ground with rain to mirror her sorrow.

 

And, as Akira watched, the rain turned to ice.

 

Droplets frozen into senbon as hard as steel pierced the earth. Trees splintered. Houzuki screamed as their flesh spontaneously hardened into glittering ice sculptures. Puddles of blood crunched underfoot, and the Uzumaki’s breath fogged in the air. Finally, Chiyo had cried herself hoarse, and her clansmembers caught her as she passed out and tended to her.

 

After all this sorrow and loss, in the morning a pale but grim Fuyuchi Chiyo came to Uzumaki Akira and said, _The lives of our kin were lost through no fault of your own. They died because of the hatred the Houzuki bore for us, because of the greed and money of some faraway lord. I have heard of your new home, Uzumaki-sama, of how you wish to live without daimyou, in the peace you have earned with the sweat of your brow and the blood of your veins. I am curious to see such a thing… Could my daughter and other innocent children live long lives in the home you are building? The Fuyuchi will keep their word; we will still assist you against the Hoshigaki. Maybe by the time we have settled them, you can convince me of your dream._

In the end, Chiyo had been convinced. In the name of the Fuyuchi, she promised friendship and allegiance to the Uzumaki, and in return Akira promised the friendship of the Uzumaki and the shelter of the newborn Land of Whirlpools. When Akira returned home after that mission, with her traveled Chiyo and her Clan – pale-eyed and carrying the hyouton in their veins, the twins of the Yuki who dwelt deeper in the Land of Water.

 

 _How we are growing_ , Uzumaki Akira had thought then, as she watched the slim builds and sleek black hair of the Fuyuchi mingle with her people, but it proved to be only the beginning.

 

Out of all of the Uzumaki’s allies, the arrival of the Shimizu had been the most surprising. In the middle of ship-to-ship combat with pirates in the waters southwest of the Land of Whirlpools, Akira had paused in the midst of ripping masts apart with her Adamantine Sealing Chains, unable to believe her eyes, for something yet more wondrous had appeared. Two giant sea dragons had risen out of the water, dwarfing the wooden ships on the heaving surface. One dragon roared and wrapped itself around a pirate ship, crushing it to wooden splinters and scrap while its sailors screamed and dove into the churning foam. The other dragon slapped the water with its tail, creating a huge wave that swept over the decks of the final pirate ship, tangling its rigging and tossing its crew helpless into the sea.

 

Eyes wide and staring, her chains poised to attack and defend, Akira had just been frantically reviewing to herself the best methods for sealing misaki and youkai into special sealing vessels or into jinchuuriki when she noticed a man standing quite casually between the horns on the second dragon’s head. Her confusion and the similar utter bewilderment of her men lasted long enough for the second dragon to gracefully swim to her ship and lower its head, the man it carried signing for a parley.

 

 _I apologize for that_ , he said, a tad sheepish, as if he had not just reenacted something out of the tales of the gods, _but those pirates have been menacing the harbor town where my clan lives. I had to do something_.

 

 _What_ , said Akira, still stunned.

 

The man blinked narrow red eyes, politely ignoring her lack of intelligent response and twitching a soaked ponytail of snow-white hair behind his back as if that would make him more presentable for official introductions. Three thin red lines marked his cheeks and chin. _Shimizu Sazanami, please take care of me_ , he said, without the slightest trace of sarcasm. _Oh, and may I introduce you to Watatsumi over there_ , he added, with a jerk of his chin to the first dragon, _and Tatsumaki dear here_ , he finished, patting the second dragon’s head with a slim, impossibly pale hand.

 

 _What_ , said Akira again.

 

Eventually, the Uzumaki mastered their surprise and inquired further of Sazanami as to his people’s situation. The Uzumaki reputation had preceded them, and he explained matters to them readily. The Shimizu Clan, it seemed, had slowly migrated south through the Land of Fire over the centuries as shifting allegiances and alliances forced them to seek refuge from their enemies or secure new employers. Currently, they had evacuated the Land of Fire altogether and had spent the last decade or two huddled in the tiny Land of Waves, conscious of how flimsy a protection its daimyou was against the much wealthier and more powerful lords to the north. Something about running from a blood feud with the Hyuuga Clan and something about the Shimizu’s traditional allies, the Uchiha Clan, having fallen into a bloody internal power struggle and no longer being able to provide much protection – Akira had not needed to hear the whole story before offering the Shimizu refuge.

 

The albino Shimizu were a clan of _medics_ , something even the Uzumaki with their strong life-forces could appreciate. In the midst of as treacherous a time as the Warring States Era, the Shimizu clung with idealistic fervor to their integrity, refusing to spill the medical secrets of previous clans they had treated even while promising to never betray the Uzumaki’s secrets for as long as the Shimizu name lived. None of the other clansmembers came close to the power held by Sazanami, who became their clan head more or less by accident when the Uzumaki accepted them into their fold, but they possessed a cleverness and a compassion rare for shinobi.

 

When Akira told the Shimizu the unofficial Uzumaki motto, _Family means no one gets left behind_ , they merely nodded as if she spoke some truism.

 

With the Shimizu behind her, Uzumaki Akira looked out over her people and felt true confidence in the Land of Whirlpools.

 

The last big addition to the Uzumaki’s allies came in the form of the Shiranui Clan, fleeing from a daimyou in the Land of Lightning who liked using them as walking suicide bombs against his enemies. The Shiranui had heard of how the Uzumaki tamed a chain of volcanoes with their fuuinjutsu and begged the redheads to invent a seal that would prevent their kekkei touta from unexpectedly activating and killing them. The Uzumaki agreed, and not only did they devise such a seal for the Shiranui but they also offered them asylum in the Land of Whirlpools. Gratefully, the Shiranui accepted.

 

This had not pleased the daimyou of the Land of Lightning. He sent envoys to Uzushio, demanding the Shiranui return. They had been born on his land, he said, and so they belonged to him. After all, had he not given them shelter and safety when no one else would allow them to live in their cities? Had he not given them work and wages? Had they not lived by his leave? They should return to him now, he said, and he would have mercy on them. He would accord them their place in his service once again.

 

But the samurai guards accompanying his envoys carried copies of the collars and chains inscribed with chakra-suppressing seals the daimyou had offered before to the Shiranui as a ‘kindness’, and Uzumaki Akira was enraged that yet another daimyou would treat those with a kekkei genkai or kekkei touta as only so much cattle. Golden chains rattled behind her back. However, Shiranui Mayu, who had been declared Clan Head by dint of being the oldest remaining clansmember to have survived their escape from the Land of Lightning, raised her hand. She smiled politely. Politeness can be a terrible, terrible thing.

 

 _Your lord gave us existence, nothing more_ , she corrected the daimyou’s envoys. _Every breath we drew was at his leisure, every child we bore was owned by him for the grace of being allowed to live on his land, and we died on his command. The Uzumaki have given us our lives back. We have tasted the free air of the sea, and we shall not return. Tell your lord this: Recall what destruction our kekkei touta can wreak, what devastation it can unleash if not carefully managed. Tell him this: Remember how brilliantly we burned and died in his service. Tell him this: Imagine how much more fiercely we shall burn and die to keep our freedom._

 

Shiranui Mayu did not possess the clan’s kekkei touta, although her two brothers had possessed it and died igniting it to facilitate their family’s escape, but, as with all of the clansmembers, her body held the lesser, related kekkei genkai. She fairly _glowed_ at Uzumaki Akira’s side, her flesh faintly incandescent as a metal rod freshly taken from a forge’s fire. Her eyes were as embers taken from a dying star.

 

The samurai backed away.

 

The daimyou’s envoys vowed that their lord would never forget this insult, but they bowed before Uzumaki Akira and returned to their own land. All were glad to be rid of them, the Uzumaki doubly glad that they had given shelter to the Shiranui. Akira shook hands with Mayu and promised her, _You and all those of your name are now as dear as kin to the Uzumaki. We shall never abandon you._ And so, the Shiranui came to the Land of Whirlpools, sometimes accounted the fourth noble clan of Uzushio.

 

With strong allies at her side and her lands at peace, Uzumaki Akira stood on the southern cliffs of her great island, looking down upon the harbors her people had tamed out of the whirling waves, and she said, _Let us build a village for our families, for now we may dwell securely and no longer as those living in fear of their foes_. _Let us maintain our defenses, so we may never be taken unawares and so that our people need never suffer natural disaster. Let us build a wall around our new village, so that no enemies may threaten our people._

 

They all agreed, and so it was that, in an auspicious year, almost a millennium and a half since the Uzumaki’s great foremother cast down the God Tree and freed the continent from its deathly hold, the construction of Uzushiogakure no Sato, the Village Hidden by the Whirling Tides, was completed. The occasion was marked with all appropriate ceremony and great celebration, and as Akira watched her people feast and dance within the walls she had sealed with her blood, she said, _As long as my blood holds true these walls shall never fall._

 

 _Is that a prophecy? Fortune-telling?_ asked Fuyuchi Chiyo, with interest.

 

Shimizu Sazanami held up his hands. _My miko ancestor may have conveyed the words of the kami-sama, but none of that can_ I _discern_.

 

 _Oh, was your kami ancestor as unhelpful as ours?_ wondered Shiranui Mayu.

 

 _If it not be prophecy, then we shall make it so, by the strength of our wills_ , said Akira, resolute. She turned to her fellow clan heads. _We have lived quite long enough in the chaos of the Warring States Era, do you not think? This New Year, let us mark the turning of a new era and restart our counting of the years._

 

They agreed, and so it was recorded that, upon the completion of Uzushio, the Uzumaki did not number the next year 1150 (for the Uzumaki had long lives and long memories, and they still told tales of those long-ago days when they bore the name Ootsutsuki) but rather year 1. Uzushio Reckoning, they named it, as the people of the new village adjusted their calendars. Decades later, as other villages sprang up across the mainland and Uzushio’s calendar – popularized by Konoha - spread to all civilized places, it would become known as the Era of Hidden States.

 

In the year 172 of that era, assaulted by the combined forces of Kumo and Kiri, Uzushio was invaded and destroyed.

 

* * *

 

 

In the oppressive, seal-silenced darkness of his office, Uzumaki Ashura sat. His fingers, so steady through decades of delicate brushwork, now trembled with exhaustion. Behind his eyelids, his eyes burned with lack of sleep and countless tears unshed. Smoke, blood, and ash stained his clothing, but his posture was impeccable. He was yet Uzumaki-sama, and he _would_ retain his pride.

 

Heartbeat after heartbeat crept by, an agonizing eternity in each split moment. All his worries, all his fears and regrets, all his responsibilities and stratagems – they had whirled through his mind over the last few days with a typhoon’s intensity, leaving only annihilation in their wake. Beyond dread and exhaustion he had passed into quiet acceptance. He could think of nothing that had not already occurred to him; he could not detail any plan better than what he had already ordered.

 

At the end of times, in the last hour of his life, it seemed fitting that he take this moment, in this silent and hallowed darkness, to mourn the death and destruction engulfing his city. To mourn the thousands of lives of family and friends lost. To make his peace with his ancestors, before he walked out to meet them.

 

After all, Uzushiogakure no Sato had been entrusted to his care. He would have to deliver an accounting of it when he met Shinigami-sama and faced the judgment of his forebears, and he would not be forced to admit that he had not given his utmost, even when his utmost had not been enough.

 

 _Uzumaki-sama._ That was how the people of his village addressed him, as they had addressed his predecessors. Such a simple title, and yet imbued with a wealth of respect. As such, he had served as the Uzumaki Clan Head and as the Uzushio Village Head for over three decades now. The years had brought premature white hairs to his head, as they had done for his father – _dammit, Arata, this should have been your job; you never should have left us_ – and Ashura knew he looked every bit of his sixty-four years.

 

The last couple of days had aged him even further.

 

Once more, the urge bit at him to worry, to review his choices and policies, to speculate on all the mistakes made by him or by his father or by his grandfather that could have led to this moment.

 

Letting out a long breath, Ashura swept these thoughts away. He may have been sitting in his office instead of within the Temple of the Sage or another sacred edifice in the highest tier of the city, but in his meditation he _would_ be master of his mind and of his thoughts.

 

Indeed, the Whirlpool Defense System had failed, sabotaged from the inside somehow ( _betrayal betrayal we have been_ betrayed _how has it come to this_ ). The maelstroms around the Uzu archipelago raged unchecked now, and it lit a spark of grim satisfaction in Ashura’s breast to know that many Kumo and Kiri invaders would fall victim to their white-foamed wrath before these last days were done.

 

The seals chaining the whirlpools having been shattered, a few of Uzumaki Akira’s retributive measures should be triggering and coming online, come to think. Ashura had studied them once, long ago, when he had been the dutiful son gaining his mastery in barrier fuuinjutsu alongside Mito; he had been so young, so earnest and eager to gather as much knowledge as he could about the seals protecting his city, his honorable foremother’s legacy. As he reviewed blueprints and seal formulae, he had observed that Akira had planned some truly _nasty_ genjutsu surprises to snap up anyone who destroyed her handiwork.

 

Arata had taken a glance at some of the century-old scrolls over Ashura’s shoulder and said with a laugh, _Those aren’t genjutsu._

 

 _How would you know?_ Ashura had fired right back. _You’re not the one studying for a barrier fuuinjutsu mastery!_

 

Arata had only laughed again, tossing a rambutan with a peel as red as his hair up into the air before catching it. Cutting it open with a curved knife – none of this kunai nonsense for Arata – he took a bite before answering. _Ah, but I did study the alphasyllabary and Samskrtam Akira used for her most powerful seals. And a genjutsu anchor wouldn’t have a summons for its main clause._

His older brother had been a genius, when he wasn’t being a damn idiot.

 

Ashura had paled. _Wait, aniki, what does this summon?!_

 

Arata had only waved a hand and walked off, finishing his rambutan. Ashura had never weaseled an answer out of him, and then Arata had run away from home to become a pirate. ( _That damn idiot.)_ Between one thing and another, the topic had never come up again in the next couple of decades – or, at least, it had never crossed Ashura’s mind during any moment when he and his brother had had a chance to sit, take a breath, and exchange words that weren’t about either Uzushio’s or Konoha’s situations. And then Arata left on that mission up north with Hashirama and never returned.

 

( _Uzushio no Arata. The Kraken of Uzu. Aniki… you might have saved us, had you been here.)_

 

Ashura still had no precise idea what Akira had in store for those who would ruin her hard work. Sometimes, he didn’t even want to guess.

 

Ashura himself was no stranger to the sort of reality-bending feats an Uzumaki pressed to his very limit might perform to save or avenge those he deemed his own.

 

When the outposts of the Whirlpool Defense System had blinked out one by one and sensors felt armies approaching, distress beacons and messages had been sent to Konoha, as fast as the wind could carry them. Mustering a large enough force to relieve the siege of Uzushio would have taken several days for Konoha, but such relief had faded from even Ashura’s wildest dreams hours ago, if not days ago. The whirlpools had been crossed. The walls had been breached. Now, he only prayed that enough of his people would escape and be granted succor by Konoha to ensure that Uzushio’s name would endure.

 

His beloved little sister Mito still dwelled in Konoha. Ashura had every confidence she would do her best for their people.

 

Suddenly, his decision to send his young granddaughter Kushina to Mito – a decision he had agonized over for _weeks_ , unwilling to sacrifice a third Uzushio princess to a Senju’s pride – seemed entirely wise. A heavy burden lay before Kushina, but she would live. She would have Mito as a mentor for a little longer, and surely their people’s survivors would join her. The Uzumaki were hardy. They would thrive.

 

Walls could be rebuilt. Seals could be rewritten.

 

Family gave walls and seals meaning, however.

 

As for Ashura’s other beloved little sister, Asuka was undoubtedly at this moment somewhere in the thick of the street-fighting, doing something inadvisable like ripping out human souls and binding them to inanimate objects. An unfortunate long-standing habit of hers, yes. ( _Still not as terrifying as Tobirama with a new idea._ ) Ashura would have preferred that Asuka join the evacuation for Mito’s sake, if none other, but he realized her pride and her rage against her homeland’s invaders gave her no other option. She’d go down as befitted a legend, even if no one would remain to memorialize her death in poetry.

 

They had already said their farewells a few hours ago. With her typical tenderness, Asuka had told him to not embarrass her by dying in a stupid way. He had promised to do his best not to let her down. She had laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, aggressively swiped at something in the corner of her eye, and them stomped off, roaring for the next group of Kumo bastards to try their luck against her.

 

 _I will greet you with joy in the next life, imouto_.

 

All the important clan buildings, libraries, temples, armories, and other halls of records and archives had been locked down under the strongest seals Uzushio could muster. Their sacred spaces would not be defiled, and the Uzumaki would not let their techniques be appropriated by their killers. Uzumaki Shinju had muttered something about probably getting a good deal from Shinigami-sama if she asked nicely, when his old friend had stalked off after their own farewells, and the sealmaster hadn’t been born in the Land of Lightning or Water who could hope to breach an Uzumaki’s Shiki Fuujin. If nothing else, surely the city’s Sealing Tower would remain impregnable. Above all else, the Uzumaki would not let their greatest accomplishment, their fuuinjutsu, be scavenged from their graves.

 

Like Asuka and Shinju, many brave souls had chosen to fight to the bitter end, cursing the invaders with their last dying breath. Ashura could have ordered every man, woman, and child to stand their ground and fight, until the streets of Uzushio were awash with blood and its fountains and waterways clogged with torn bodies. He could have traded the lives of his people for inflicting on Kumo and Kiri a punishment so devastating the whole world would reel with horror. He could have brought out from Akira’s vault of the most forbidden fuuinjutsu a sealing array to rouse the wrath of the Blue Tiger, kindling fire in its belly until the conical mountain overlooking Uzushio became swollen with magma and erupted, shattering the island into small fragments as with the fury of a god. He could have killed his people and invaders alike in storms of ash and gas and floods of mud and tephra. Had the invasion occurred half a year later, during the storm season, perhaps he and the diligent masters of the Uzushio Sealing Tower could have harnessed a typhoon to smash their assailants like the breath of the storm god.

 

Yes, he could have done all that.

 

Perhaps another man would have made those choices. Perhaps some other Uzumaki, sitting in his place, would weigh the balance of scales differently and decide breaking the might of Kumo and Kiri would be worth such utter devastation. Perhaps vengeance would have appealed more strongly to another member of Akira’s line. Perhaps another father, grandfather, governor would have submitted to a broken heart and given such orders.

 

In another world, perhaps Uzushio’s death throes did plunge the world into a false winter of ash and carnage.

 

Here and now, however, Ashura did not make that choice. Instead, he had acknowledged Uzushio as lost, for now, and decided to at least try to save some of his people. A number of volunteers decided to remain as sacrifices, holding off the shinobi and other raiders employed by Kumo and Kiri, while those who could or would flee made along the inner city wall between districts towards the west. No route was safe, but speed and mobility were critical: aiming directly for the mainland seemed wisest. Kumo had forced entry from the north, after all, and the concentration of foes was fewest to the west. Was it a trap? Perhaps. Did they have better options? Unfortunately, no.

 

Ashura had organized the evacuation as best he could, entrusting the lives of his people to ones he trusted with all his heart. His beloved eldest daughter, Minaka, had perished in a riot of golden chains and poisonous chakra earlier in the invasion, but he had extracted oaths from his remaining two children that they would accompany the evacuation and honor the village of their forebears by seeing their people to safety. Akemi, the greatest medic the Shimizu Clan had yet produced, had agreed to join the refugees. It would have to be enough. Ashura could do no more for them in this hour – no more, other than to step forth from his darkened sanctuary into the blood-stenched, tumultuous ruin of his home city, and to draw with deadly show every enemy eye to him in their stead.

 

Ah, yes. How had his good friend Shinju described it?

 

 _“We shall make_ such an end _that our enemies, and our enemies’ children, and our enemies’ children’s children, shall shake with fear at our memory.”_

 

In the darkness, Ashura’s lip quirked just the tiniest fraction.

 

She had always had a gift for the dramatic.

 

Not that he disagreed with the sentiment. Not at all.

 

He felt this sentiment as a vow sworn with steady lips, as an unquenchable conflagration deep in his soul, a roaring beast that screamed at the sacrilege of enemy feet upon the hallowed ground of his home. He felt it in a father’s grief, a grandfather’s fear, a governor’s duty, a brother’s resolve, a son’s worry.

 

But there was, perhaps, in every Uzumaki’s heart something of the berserker: something that had skipped over their more stoic kin, the Senju, with their balanced chakra and easy union with the energy of the world, but something which echoed – as in a mirror, darkly - in the shadowed minds and blood-wheeling eyes of their Uchiha cousins.

 

An Uzumaki in the grips of rage, however, had no need to summon an avatar of a storm god he did not worship.

 

That little quirk of the lips morphed into a serene, terrifying smile.

 

With a silent exhale, Ashura let the last drop of natural energy he had gathered from his dying city twist into the churning ocean of his own chakra ( _blood so much blood he could taste every death hear every scream and it_ cried out _to him_ _for purification and justice_ ). Senjutsu chakra settled over his shoulders like a mantle of duty, in the form of engraved golden collars around his neck and of a coat of rich red and gold down his back and arms. Two small horns weighed down his brow as they grew from the edges of his forehead. Although he could not see it, he knew the pupils of his eyes now gleamed yellow and the skin around them had been painted as red as the dawn.

 

Smoothly, Ashura rose to his feet. Without word or touch, the door of his office opened before him. Up the stairwell to his ears resounded the screams and crashes of outside combat, but they parted around him like the last clouds of night before the dawn. All other occupants of the building had departed, but the enemies had not yet breached the tower, so not a hand lifted to oppose his passage. As before, the main door of Uzumaki-sama’s tower flew open before him without prompting, and he stepped out into the pre-dawn chaos, and dawn flowed with him.

 

Tower of the Uzumaki behind him, temples and other distinguished buildings on all sides, and Ashura stood in this moment in the midst of the highest square of Uzushio. Far behind him, the cone of the Blue Tiger rumbled uneasily. Screams and explosions on end ripped the air about him; blood and saltwater saturated with decay filled his nostrils. In the distance, white-jacketed squads of Kumo nin and more haphazard shinobi from Kiri charged towards this district, eager for the loot and eager for the slaughter.

 

Ashura raised one hand, and power collected beneath his fingers into red fire. He extended his arm, and with a quick spin on his heel carved a shallow circular trench at a distance around him, encompassing most of the yet-untouched square. Behind him sat the sacred spaces of Uzushio, and before him rampaged the invaders.

 

He would not let them pass.

 

He was Uzumaki Ashura, son of Uzumaki Ashina in unbroken line to Ootsutsuki Usha, daughter of the Sage of Six Paths. While he still breathed, he reigned as lord of this village, the master of the seas of Uzu no Kuni, the Head Uzumaki of Uzushiogakure no Sato. His blood linked in continuous golden chain to their foremother, the goddess of dawn, and he had learned wisdom at the feet of gurus, had mastered the art of pacifying his soul’s unruly desires until he could listen to the whispers of the world and could immerse himself in the flow of nature’s energy.

 

Thus, with eyes the gold of sage mode, Ashura lifted his right hand in the gesture of fearlessness.

 

For, as the invaders rushed towards him with wave and lightning, Ashura was not wholly himself.

 

In this moment, Ashura stood there also as the White Bull of Kailasa, son of the dawn, Nandi, the joyous door-keeper of the god of destruction.

 

 _He would not let them pass_.

 

* * *

 

 

Shimizu Akemi had known much of war during her lifetime.

 

Although born to the safety of the splendid and neutral Uzushiogakure no Sato, she had left it behind for the chaos of the mainland, spending years as a young medic managing an unprotected clinic in the middle of nowhere in the Land of Fire. She had seen battle upon battle, massacre upon massacre; she had survived accidents and would-be assassinations, and she had stared down daimyou and arrogant clan heads to ensure her own path. Over a decade she had dwelled in her cousins’ newly built Konohagakure no Sato, teaching and healing. She had returned to Uzushio only to find the ground upon which she trod disquietingly worshipped by the younger generation and her sister still not speaking to her. If it had not been for a goddaughter turned apprentice, she might have returned to the mainland. How could she live in a village that could not comprehend all the things she had seen?

 

For so much of her life, her village had ceased to be a home. Instead, it had ghosted to the back of her mind, a memory or a mere backdrop to the story of her life rather than a living idea. It had made her who she was, of course, but it had so rarely been _present._

 

What a cruel joke the gods had played on her, she felt, that Uzushio would feel most keenly like home only as she watched it die.

 

She would die with it, she supposed, and an almost perverse joy bubbled up within her at the realization that, in this last moment, she should die where she belonged: in her home, for her people.  

 

Oh, her death was not certain, not yet, but Akemi did not delude herself. This evacuation was risky. She would do her level best to survive and aid others. As the senior medic-nin present, she could not throw away her life rashly. Hundreds of lives rested in her hands.

 

Unfortunately, that burden was all too familiar.

 

Once before now she had watched death incarnate approach a village full of helpless people, after all. Even years later, she had suffered nightmares of how the Kyuubi had rampaged towards Konoha, the toxic red cloud of its malevolent chakra settling over the homes and streets like the miasma of the Shinigami’s breath. She remembered all too well both those she had been able to save and those whom she had to watch perish horribly, either crushed by debris or their flesh boiled by bijuu chakra. She remembered Hashirama’s weary wretchedness at what had to be done, the pallor of Mito’s cheeks and the dark circles under her eyes as she adjusted to her new burden without whispering a word of complaint. She could recall as if yesterday the grimness of Tobirama’s gaze when he unsealed that bastard’s body to check that it was really him, that he was really, finally dead. Dry-eyed, Akemi had volunteered to help him.

 

It had been him. He was dead.

Somehow, though, Akemi could never quite fully dismiss fears of him turning up again one day, Sharingan spinning in the eyes of a new and worse monster.

 

These combined forces of Kumo and Kiri arraying themselves against Uzushio seemed so tame in comparison, so _mundane_. Uzushio would be destroyed in an act of war, rather than obliterated by hand of a cruel god. It made no difference in the end. However crude their methods, Kumo and Kiri would suffice.

 

They almost hadn’t.

 

Despite their numbers, Kumo and Kiri had not fielded nearly enough shinobi to completely surround Uzushio, and their assaults had not been well-coordinated. Each wanted the loot and the glory of Uzushio’s demise, and their alliance was no doubt an uneasy one.

 

Kiri’s forces had arrived slightly earlier, swarming in like vicious schooling fish from the southeast. They had utterly wrecked Uzushio’s fortified harbors and sea-going vessels in a mindless orgy of fire, ice, and shattered wood before throwing themselves against the village’s seal-etched walls. Less used to combat on the waves than the nin of Kiri, Kumo had brought their vessels for transporting fighters and supplies right to the northern coasts of Whirlpool’s main island and disembarked from them there. Their fighters had crossed the island swiftly on food, burning crops and settlements as they went. During the furious few days of the invasion, some squads of Kumo nin _had_ been sighted off Uzushio’s western walls, likely to thwart just such an evacuation attempt as was now attempted and to cut off the route to Konoha. That said, they were few compared to the white-jacketed masses who had poured through the breach the Hachibi jinchuuriki had made in the city’s northern walls. This route would have to do.

 

Kumo would need a new jinchuuriki for the Hachibi when it reformed, though.

 

Perhaps an Uzumaki would grin savagely at the fall of such a valiant and powerful enemy; perhaps an Uzumaki would rage at the destruction that the Hachibi had wreaked with the single-minded fury of a protector. Akemi, who knew more than a little about how one went about sealing youkai and bijuu into jinchuuriki and who had watched a dear friend take up that heavy burden, could not indulge in such emotion.

 

No matter one’s allegiance, it had to have been a painful thing to watch the Hachibi jinchuuriki recoil in agony when the fuuinjutsu backlash of breaking Uzushio’s walls hit him. Despite her station at the hospital, Akemi had sensed the torrential inky outpour of bijuu chakra from across the village as the Hachibi lashed out in uncontrollable frenzy. She had tended to the few survivors who had been bundled away from the ravaged walls in the aftermath, extracting the bijuu chakra from their scorched meridian systems and purifying them before they could choke on it.

 

She had saved as many as she could, but it was not enough. The hole the jinchuuriki had smashed in Uzushio’s walls had let the Kumo nin pour through, and the Kiri nin soon followed. A horde composed of fighters from the many, many clans of the Land of Water and from the cool hills and ghylls of the Land of Lightning, they represented most of the fighting forces of their home villages, they outnumbered the shinobi of Uzushio several times over. The end had been inevitable. Less than half a day later, Uzumaki-sama had ordered the evacuation attempt and set its organization into motion.

 

And here they were, pre-dawn mists darkening into dawn-lit smoke clouds. Old and young, sick and injured, civilian and scholar and shinobi alike, all scooting with as much haste and as much silence as they could muster towards the western walls of the village. Although Uzushio’s walls had stood the tallest and most fortified in their outer ring around the whole of the city, they had further divided the city within into districts. The wall separating off the lower district, containing the major marketplaces and the Fuyuchi clan compound, just so happened to run almost due west until it hit the outer perimeter. Within its sturdy stone ran a covered passage for its entire length, only accessible at a few heavily sealed guardhouses. The refugees had entered this corridor near its easternmost end, where they had gathered for safety in the higher areas of the village, and now they rushed to escape their dying home.

 

Akemi knew it was too much to hope that their escape, as relatively concealed from the eyes as it might be, would remain undetected by the invaders, but she hoped the corridor would protect them long enough to make it out. At any moment, a sensor or someone with keen enough senses to hear or smell them above the chaos of the invasion might notice their movement. With the outer wall breached, its sealwork tainted by bijuu chakra, the whole web fortifying the village’s walls and other infrastructure had been weakened; the covered corridor would not shield them against a continuous assault.

 

 _Thank the kami for small mercies_ , Akemi reflected. _Iwa isn’t here_.

 

At her side, Chikako-chan stumbled, and Akemi grasped a small hand and tugged the girl to her feet without so much as glancing down.  Her apprentice’s little kouhai had been an invaluable help over the last few days, swallowing down all the terror she had to be drowning in to run errands, carry supplies, bind bandages, and so forth. Akemi would have liked to do more for the girl, even if only for Hiromi’s sake, but the thousands of demands on her attention and compassion right now prevented it. She could do no more to ensure Chikako-chan’s well-being or survival than she could for anyone else in this evacuation. A quick admonition of, “Stick close to me, Chikako-chan,” had to be enough.

 

Akemi had already bidden farewell to so many relatives and friends through her lifetime, and these last few days had added dozens more names to that list. She had outlived her brother, her parents, and all her cousins, had just watched the second of her nephews die from ruptured organs she could not stitch back together in time, and had left behind her sister to seal up the Shimizu clan meeting hall with her death.

 

These blows she accepted and moved on. Maybe later she’d grieve, if she was given the time for it.

 

Friends and kin she’d left behind in the smoking village to cut a crimson swathe through Kumo and Kiri as a distraction, friends and kin she had in Konoha who would hear this dire news soon enough, friends and kin whose fates she’d likely never learn before she too met the Shinigami… so many names.

 

Exhaustion scattered her thoughts, and memories of decades of conflict and triage threatened her focus. Sleep was a distant memory, but the weariness was more than bone-deep. As a Shimizu, Akemi had only a modest pool of chakra upon which to draw, and not all the chakra storage seals in the world could alleviate the drain of hours upon hours of healing, sealing, organizing, and running. She had dismissed her sea snake summons an hour ago, over Mirou’s protests; despite the many battles and hours of healing he had spent wrapped around her neck and shoulders, there was little more he could do for her now other than to offer the silent comfort of his presence, and Akemi would not see him die with her.  

 

Akemi would have wished that her apprentice would inherit Mirou as her personal summons, but her foolishly hidebound sister had always refused to let Hiromi sign the clan’s sea snake summons charter. It had been only one of many disagreements between Akemi and Akiko.

 

 _She’s a talented and compassionate girl!_ Akemi had argued. _She will achieve nothing but good with this!_

_Talent or no, I will not allow that bastard girl access to one of our clan’s most treasured items!_ Akiko had snapped back. _I am the Shimizu Clan Head. If I do not look out for the reputation of our clan, who will? You? You would only drag us down!_

 

More hurtful words had been uttered. Doors hadn’t been slammed, only because both of them were far too polite to indulge in such childish displays. Instead, Akemi had seriously contemplated swiping the sea snake summons contract from the clan’s treasury and letting Hiromi sign it in secret. With how the past week had gone, Akemi sorely regretted that she had not done so.

 

Of course, she had no idea whether Hiromi still lived.

 

Hiromi – her beloved goddaughter, her brilliant apprentice, a bittersweet child of a departed relative and a grieving friend. Obviously, her courier mission had been a trap. Even three squads of Uzushio nin had limited chances of survival against a Kumo army sweeping south to wipe out Whirlpool. The safe bet said Hiromi lay dead in a field or ditch somewhere, white hair stained redder than her eyes.

 

Kumo hated albinos, after all.

 

Araya-kun’s squad had been assigned that mission, as well. That fact gave Akemi a single shard of hope. No matter how much he hated it, Araya-kun resembled his grandsire down to his very soul, and the last time Akemi had walked past him his chakra had _rattled_ with golden chains so, so close to the surface. It also hadn’t slipped Akemi’s notice how the boy’s gaze softened on catching sight of Hiromi. He was Hiromi’s best hope of survival, and she his. More thought than that, Akemi could not spare for them. She had said a prayer and moved on.

 

At her side, Chikako-chan stumbled again, but Akemi could not free a hand to right her. The refugees in front of her had crowded close, their pace slowing, and even on her tiptoes Akemi could not see over redheads or broad Miura backs. They should be approaching the end of this corridor, with no time to waste. Had some damage been dealt to the passage, or what else blocked the way?

 

Akemi gave a quick tug to the clothing of a scarred Fuyuchi in front of her and relayed this question. Soon the answer came rippling back to her in the whispers of a dozen frightened mouths: the first refugees had reached the end of the passage, and they had found Kumo squads waiting for them. That had been anticipated, however. They had drawn up plans to counteract this when they had organized the evacuation: Fuyuchi to sling ice and projectiles to break up the squads, Uzumaki ninjutsu specialists to sweep them away with suiton and fuuinjutsu users to delay their approach with barriers. Why were they not proceeding with that plan?

 

Then came the two words Akemi most dreaded to hear: “Nibi jinchuuriki.”

 

_No._

_No._

_Not the Nibi._

The Kyuubi had been malice raw enough to boil living flesh, the Hachibi had been a typhoon of ink and power to rend the skies and shake the earth, and the Sanbi had been as some hideous creature dragged up from the ocean’s depths, choking its victims with coral and paralyzing their minds with loathly genjutsu. Akemi had not faced the Nibi, but tales had circulated of how, during the Great Shinobi War, its jinchuuriki had been tortured until the nekomata bijuu went mad and began reanimating nearby corpses. Those tales were true. Akemi knew her cousin would not have brought back out the Edo Tensei he had himself banned for any lesser cause.

 

The steadiness of her voice surprised her when she asked, “Are the dead walking yet?”

 

The answer was relayed to her from the front: “No, not yet.”

 

Behind Akemi, a woman shoved through the now-stationary crowd of refugees, her quality clothing smeared with blood, mud, and worse. She pushed the bags she had been carrying into the arms of a clansmember and drew herself up, as dignified as a princess. Dark blue hair had been swirled into a loose bun on the back of her head, and seals scrawled in identical lines down the two halves of her face over her plain brown eyes.

 

“I’ll do it,” she said, staring straight at Akemi without a visible shred of doubt or second-guessing. “I’ve got the kekkei touta. Let me clear a path.”

 

Shiranui Tentomo. Akemi recognized her now. Both she and her twin sister, Tenma, possessed the nigh-uncontrollable kekkei touta that had once made the Shiranui Clan the favored living weapons of the daimyou of the Land of Lightning. What Tentomo suggested now would almost certainly kill her. Still, she offered her sacrifice freely, and, with the weight of so many other lives on her shoulders, what could Akemi do but accept?

 

She nodded.

 

Tentomo’s lips thinned. She nodded back. Shucking off her outer coat and handing it off to someone who would need it more, she elbowed past Akemi and forced her way to the end of the passage. Urging those next to her onwards as well, Akemi issued quiet orders to those still combat-ready and to those less mobile. As she had said, Tentomo would clear a path. It might not take out the Nibi jinchuuriki, but it would annihilate the other Kumo squads. In the meanwhile, the Uzushio refugees would hug the ruined wall to edge around the fight before once more making a break for the sea.

 

Behind her, Akemi’s orders rippled through the assembled people, desperate whispers of a last stand. Chikako-chan almost forgotten at her side, Akemi took advantage of her small stature to edge through the press to the end of the corridor. As one of the most high-ranking individuals left in this evacuation, she had to be able to direct the refugees once they reached the open. As she emerged from the corridor and stepped up the small twisting stairwell to the ramparts of Uzushio’s outer wall, she found Shiranui Tentomo standing on the brink, head and torso visible to those waiting on the other side.

 

Without moving her head, Tentomo observed, “They’re just waiting. They know they have the advantage.”

 

Akemi risked a quick glance over the wall. At least a dozen squads of Kumo nin stood waiting, weapons at the ready, their unblemished white flak jackets clearly indicating they had been held in reserve for just this purpose. In front of them, glowing eyes and a haze of eerie blue chakra labeled the jinchuuriki.

 

“Brash of them,” Akemi murmured.

 

“They’re expecting to prey on women, children, and the aged,” Tentomo agreed with a snarl. “Maybe they wish to capture some rare bloodlines. _But I will not go back_.”

 

More refugees emerged from the corridor, fanning down the wall in preparation for descending over it. Those who could treewalk were instructed to carry those who could not; pulleys would be quickly rigged to transfer supplies down to the ground below. It all depended, however, on Tentomo keeping the combat – and, most importantly, the Nibi – away from them long enough.

 

Akemi briefly rested a hand on the Shiranui’s shoulder. “We will not forget your name, Shiranui Tentomo,” she assured her.

 

Tentomo merely nodded again. Drawing a deep breath, she gestured for the other refugees to keep clear of her. Hurriedly, they moved back. Down below, the Kumo squads had grown restless; one or two taunts in their rough language drifted up, jeering. Tentomo ignored them. Bringing her hands together, she folded them into the Ram seal.

 

“ _Kai.”_

 

On her face, the twin lines of seals glowed a dangerous red, like blood within living flesh lit up by the sun. The seals receded across her skin now that they had been shut off, compressing into two small diamonds underneath her eyes. Scarcely a heartbeat or two later, and her irides lit up – a violent, eldritch green. At her throat and wrists, her veins glowed with the same hue. So much chakra was filling her body that she literally shone, casting shadows all around her.

 

Below on the ground, a Kumo nin shouted a warning. The Nibi jinchuuriki hissed, darting forward and up as if to stop Tentomo.

 

For her part, the Shiranui emitted a high, wailing shriek – one of the most horrible sounds Akemi had ever heard – and leapt off the wall. Chakra blazed around her like the fiery shroud ringing a falling meteorite, only growing in intensity.

 

Midair, she hit the Nibi jinchuuriki, hurling them both to the earth in the midst of the Kumo squads.

 

Then with a _boom_ like thunder the earth shook, and the world went green.

 

* * *

 

 

Uzumaki Kimi was nobody special.

 

The second of four children in an average Uzushio household, she had been privately educated alongside her siblings by a tutor and had displayed enough skill in calligraphy, along with the requisite traits of thoughtfulness, good memory, and attention to detail, that her tutor had recommended her for fuuinjutsu. Although she attained an expertise in barrier fuuinjutsu, she possessed neither the inventiveness nor the drive to become a fuuinjutsu master, so she abandoned further serious study and submitted her application to the Whirlpool Defense System.

 

She spent a year and a half training under a mentor, learning all she could about the complex inter-connected seal system that protected Uzushio from its hostile terrain. She had made sketches of the seals carved deep in the city’s walls; she had read countless scrolls concerning Uzumaki Akira’s achievements; she had traced out on foot the giant web of fuuinjutsu stretching across Whirlpool’s main island and beyond, sealing arrays set up at strategic points on various rock outcroppings, on lighthouses, on stationary buoys out in the bay, and so forth.

 

Marking these locations on a map, she saw they had formed a giant spiral of seals. This greater whole had brought the ocean itself under the Uzumaki’s domain. Firstly, it rendered the seawater itself a sensing system for the village, ensuring that the approach of enemies either through or on top of the water would not be missed. Additionally, this seal system tamed the waves themselves. Through alterations made at the master control seal of the array, the system could slow the whirlpools’ fury, allowing safe passage for Uzushio’s ships and for the ships of their allies and trading partners. Conversely, the seal system could also whip the whirlpools into a frenzy, making Uzushio’s island more naturally fortified than ever.

 

The last time this had occurred and foreign parties had been left to deal alone with unpredictable currents and treacherous reefs, Kimi had been informed, had been during the Great Shinobi War. Uzushio no Arata had fallen alongside Senju Hashirama, and Uzushio had expected further aggression from the north.

 

Years had passed since then, and, while Kimi was not so ignorant of the larger political situation as to believe all was well, she had not expected an invasion. She would have acted earlier, if so. She had a husband and a toddler in her care, after all. A member of the Whirlpool Defense System in good standing if of low rank, she had been assigned to man the seal station at a lighthouse set on a tiny rock island to the southwest of the Uzu main island. The seal array at that point had been etched into the stone of the lighthouse’s carefully warded cellar, which had been prepped and equipped as a sealing chamber of decent caliber. Her family lived in other rooms of the small lighthouse, and maintaining the beacon itself was no great task for Kimi, as integrated as it was with the seal system.

 

Only three other souls lived on that tiny island, but it had not been a bad existence. Kimi had somehow kept a tiny garden alive, her husband was clever with nets and traps to catch fish and crustaceans, and every so often they made a quick trip to the main island for supplies and a visit to family. A rudimentary radio kept Kimi informed of more urgent developments and orders from her superiors in the Whirlpool Defense System.

 

Normally, the status of the whole of the seal system could only be viewed from the master control seal in its station on the main island, but as a little side project Kimi had made a crude monitoring seal of her own and tied it into the greater seal system. It could do no harm to the great Whirlpool seal system; it merely piggybacked onto its anchor spiral and checked that it was functioning. Kimi had begun experimenting with monitoring seals during sleepless nights after her son was born, and she’d had passing thoughts of possibly trying for an expertise in monitoring and security fuuinjutsu, given a couple more years of research. This had seemed as decent a project as any.

 

Thus it was that, despite knowing nothing of the Kumo army approaching from the north or the Kiri army approaching from the southeast, she had noticed the outermost seal stations of the Whirlpool Defense System blinking out.

 

Frowning, Kimi had set aside everything else and sat down to re-examine her homemade monitoring seal. It seemed to be in order. Not willing to believe that, she hurriedly re-wrote her monitoring seal in its entirety and activated it. It reported the same results. She checked the sealing array in the lighthouse’s cellar. It was operating at optimal efficiency. Nothing seemed to be amiss.

 

Kimi bit her lip. Exiting the cellar, she stepped outside to see what could be seen. The seas were relatively calm; the sky was clear; her husband sat at the end of the pier, repairing his fishing nets; her son was happily playing. She ducked back inside and tried to raise the Whirlpool Defense control station on her radio. Only static answered her. She tried again, worriedly. Once more, it failed to respond.

 

Kimi had never been an anxious person. She had always been the level-headed sort and, even if not relentlessly optimistic, she held that most circumstances worked out in the end as long as one approached them with thoughtfulness and hard work.

 

In this moment, she panicked.

 

She rushed down to the pier and explained the situation to her husband. He shared her concern, but suggested she should check some other avenues first. Kimi told him she had checked all the obvious approaches and, short of marching over to Uzushio itself, she did not know what else to do. Deep in her gut, she knew something was wrong.

 

Finally, they compromised. Her husband agreed to finish what he was doing and come inside, bringing their son along, and Kimi would go write a few more seals checking other aspects of the Whirlpool Defense System’s health. If all of those came back negatively as well, then they would act.

 

In a rush, she flew down to the cellar and drafted two more seals. One measured the average chakra strength currently present in the Whirlpool seal system. The other measured the chakra flow and resonance currently experienced by the sealing array in the lighthouse cellar. The first measurement seal reported a much lower value than it should have, and it steadily drifted lower as Kimi examined it, like a wounded creature bleeding out. Over the next two hours, it jumped to a new low before drifting again, each jump corresponding with a point winking out on her homemade monitoring seal.

 

“Oh, no, no, not good,” Kimi muttered, pressing a fist to her mouth as she picked up her other measurement seal, which she had set aside to charge. “Definitely not good,” she added, grimacing at the results.

 

The sealing array for which she was responsible, being linked to all the other sealing arrays in the system, experienced a relatively constant flow of chakra from the other arrays that formed the giant spiral; as this chakra was almost entirely fueled by Uzumaki and ambient chakra drawn from Whirlpool’s environment, its similar composition enabled a resonance effect: each ‘loop’ of the giant spiral was strengthened by the others. Kimi had had to understand and be able to explain all of this thoroughly before she could take up her post at that little lighthouse. She could diagnose very well what she was looking at. She wished she couldn’t.

 

That resonance had been shot. The removal of several sealing arrays at key points on the north and southwestern sides of the spiral had interrupted the Whirlpool Defense System to a significant enough degree that the individual sealing arrays were no longer communicating well with each other. Her sealing array was barely receiving any chakra from the previous array in the spiral, and it was sending very little on to the next array. The entire spiral had been weakened.

 

Grabbing up her seals, Kimi marched out of the cellar to find her husband and waved them in his face. By no means a fuuinjutsu expert, he went a little cross-eyed looking at them, but he understood well enough what she was saying when she cried out, “Something is killing the seal system, Isora!”

 

Grim-faced, he looked at her and asked, “What do you want to do?”

 

Perhaps he had intended for them to return to Uzushio and alert them of the situation there. Kimi had considered that option and set it aside. Those at the control station for the Whirlpool Defense System would not be any less informed than she, and her assistance would be minimal. If, as she feared, enemy forces were moving to attack Uzushio, then her lack of combat-applicable skills did not demand her return to defend her city. Instead, her duty lay with her husband and her son. She had to see them to safety.

 

“Pack up everything,” she told her husband. “We’re leaving.”

 

Mere hours later, everything they owned had been packed away into storage scrolls, and Kimi had activated every single security fuuinjutsu present on the lighthouse – even adding a few of her own, just to make it that more difficult for any enemies trying to sabotage it. She set up distress signals interpretable by any Uzushio or Konoha nin. Then she gathered her son in her arms, took her husband’s hand, and set off across the water for the closest island to the northwest. There they rested for a little. She had brought the radio with them, and she tried to communicate with Uzushio once more, receiving just static yet again. She shook her head, traded worried glances with her husband, and they ran across the water to the next island – and then the next, and then the next, all the way to the mainland.

 

Even the comparative safety of a port town on the mainland did not assuage Kimi’s fears. She could not contact Uzushio. The Whirlpool Defense System had failed. Her husband and son were in danger.

 

Only a day and a half after they fled the lighthouse and just barely had they had the chance to catch their breath on the mainland, Kimi’s monitoring and measurement seals failed outright. They spat nonsense back out at her; one of them deactivated itself and reverted to a compressed form, now only a spiral of ink on her rice paper instead of rows of values and labels. Watching over her shoulder as she worked and quieting their son, her husband asked, “What does that mean?”

 

Kimi stared at her seals, her gut absolutely frozen with dread. “The spiral’s down.”

 

“And?”

 

“The Defense System is broken. I think… I think the seals in Uzushio’s walls broke. They served as an anchor for it, too.” Crouched on a hilltop overlooking the shore, as if she could peer all the way across the intervening kilometers to Uzushio over the horizon, Kimi tried to find rational basis for what her intuition screamed at her. “If… if the walls have been breached, then… oh, no. No, no, no. Not good. Not good at all.”

 

She scrambled around for another sheet of rice paper; fortunately, she had recently visited Uzushio for supplies when they fled the lighthouse, and she had paper and ink aplenty.

 

“What’s not good?” her husband asked.

 

“If the spiral’s down, and the walls are down, then… well.” Kimi bit her lip, hurriedly tracing out the sort of monitoring seals she had studied to enter the Whirlpool Defense System and hadn’t touched since, as she wasn’t assigned to monitor the Blue Tiger. “Bad things happen, let’s say.”

 

“The whirlpools revert to their natural state,” her husband offered.

 

“Yes, they do,” Kimi agreed absently, “but so does the Blue Tiger.”

 

Her husband’s chin jerked up. “Will there be an eruption?”

 

Kimi finished her crude seismic monitoring seal and pushed chakra into it, watching as its reported signal wobbled. “I… I don’t know. I wouldn’t bet either way.”

 

“Konoha will come,” her husband told her, possibly with more assurance than he felt. “They’re our sister village. If something truly bad is happening, they won’t abandon us.”

 

“You’re right.” Kimi let out a long breath. “Konoha will come to our aid.”

 

Over the next few days, word trickled in to the mainland port town of how Kumo and Kiri had launched an invasion of Uzushio. The tales grew in the telling, of course. Jinchuuriki and golden chains and demigods, oh my – but no one exaggerated the Blue Tiger. The volcano had let off several steam-blasts as Kumo and Kiri finally overran Uzushio, a clear threat they had ignored, and had finally blown its top. Pumice and debris drifted to the mainland on ash-saturated waves, and the sea breeze was tainted by smoke and faint sulfur.

 

The volcano, long ago named in honor of the tiger goddess of victory, had boiled over in fury at Uzushio’s fate. Kumo and Kiri fled before its wrath, unable to stay and loot as they would wish. In their wake, the Blue Tiger continued to rumble, its grievances not yet fully appeased.

 

On the mainland, Kimi saw very few survivors from Uzushio – scattered and disheartened and just as angry-bewildered-devastated as she. She knew that, like them, she had to make plans for life in a world without her home. She had no clue where to start.

 

Konoha never came.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *T’Challa voice* And as you can see, I am not dead!
> 
> Is this a filler chapter? Yeah, kinda. However, I had some important world-building and foreshadowing to work in, so deal with it.
> 
> Canonically, the Uchiha are Shinto and the Senju are Buddhist. As I propose that the Uzumaki are best explained by the existence of a redheaded daughter of the Sage of Six Paths (which would fit the two guys/one girl pattern Kishimoto so loves!), whom I have named Ootsutsuki Usha (or Ushas), I have made them Buddhists who remember they were once Hindu. I saw the names ‘Indra’ and ‘Ashura’ and ran with it. And, yes, Uzumaki Ashura is a Cow Sage.
> 
> Why did I give the Shiranui a history, a kekkei genkai, and a kekkei touta? Because ‘Shiranui’ is too cool of a name *not* to do something with it, even if that thing is minor. I do have plans.
> 
> Dead this chapter: Uzumaki Ashura, Uzumaki Asuka, Uzumaki Minaka, Shiranui Tentomo
> 
> Relevant Character Death Toll: 19


End file.
